AI experiments · Sep 2026

Jev read every CLAUDE.md

A census of what developers actually tell their coding agents. 25,784 CLAUDE.md and 10,662 AGENTS.md files from public GitHub, weighted to the full population, judged on eleven questions each.

jev-claudemd.pages.dev

What 25,784 CLAUDE.md files actually say to the agent

25,784
CLAUDE.md files: 35%
start with /init boilerplate: $2.37
to score all of them

01Sampling

GitHub code search caps at 1,000 results, so the harvest slices by file size and records each slice's total to reweight. 38,000 files fetched, deduped, and scored in about four minutes.

02Findings

57% give exact commands, 32% tell the agent to verify its work, 48% have a hard never-do rule, and only 6% say anything about git. Under 1% leak a real secret, and none of those repos are linked anywhere.