200 Lines in CLAUDE.md Dropped My Code Quality to 79% — Splitting into 3 Files Got It to 96.9%

More rules should mean better output. That's the intuition. I spent weeks building a comprehensive CLAUDE.md — 200 lines covering naming conventions, security rules, error handling, architectural patterns, import ordering, type safety requirements, and more. I was proud of it. I'd thought through every scenario. Then I scored the output. 79.0 / 100. My carefully crafted documentation was actively making AI performance worse. Here's the experiment, what I found, and how restructuring it to 4 file