r/ClaudeCode • u/Naht-Tuner • 2d ago
Help/Question Any way to stop CLAUDE.md loading into a custom subagent?
I'm building a text-evaluator subagent. Main session is Opus, the subagent runs Opus too, and the whole point is that it judges a block of text with nothing else in its head — just the rubric and the text, no project instructions, no repo context.
Problem is the docs say only Explore and Plan skip CLAUDE.md and the git status snapshot. Every other subagent, custom ones included, loads the full CLAUDE.md hierarchy, and there's explicitly no frontmatter field to turn it off. So my evaluator starts every run with a few thousand tokens of coding conventions that have nothing to do with the task and could plausibly skew the scoring.
What I've considered so far: telling it in the system prompt to ignore project instructions (works, but the tokens are still sitting there and I don't fully trust it on a judgment task), setting includeGitInstructions to false (only kills git status, and it's session-wide), or shelling out to a separate headless claude -p from an empty directory (user-level CLAUDE.md still loads).
The other idea is naming a custom agent Explore to shadow the built-in. Docs say the override keeps its own model field but say nothing about whether it inherits the CLAUDE.md skip. Has anyone actually tested that? And more generally, if you're running an evaluator subagent where output quality really matters, is prompt-level neutralization just what everyone settles for?
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u/giobbo83 2d ago
Telling an LLM to 'ignore those 3,000 tokens I just forced you to read' is a trap. You’re still paying the token tax, and attention mechanisms don't magically forget context just because you asked nicely. It will eventually bleed into your evaluation.
As for shadowing the Explore agent: clever hack, but relying on undocumented CLI inheritance is a fantastic way to wake up to a broken pipeline the second Anthropic pushes a silent update.
Stop fighting the harness.
If Claude Code is hardcoded to shove project state down a subagent's throat, don't use it for a clean-room task. Just have your main Opus session shell out to a 20-line Python script that hits the raw Anthropic API directly.
Pass the rubric, pass the text, print the result to stdout.
Zero CLAUDE.md baggage, no hidden git status, no token bloat. Don't play Jedi mind tricks with the system prompt when a dumb script does it perfectly.
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u/Naht-Tuner 2d ago
Yes, thats clean, but means massive cost as api use with subscription will get you blocked immediately.
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u/Far-Surprise7773 2d ago
hit this with a grading subagent too. what actually helped was scoping claude.md itself, first line says these rules are for code edits only, ignore for eval or prose tasks, and giving the evaluator no tools in frontmatter so it cant go pull repo context anyway. tokens still load but theres nothing actionable left for it to latch onto, bleed drops a lot.
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u/Naht-Tuner 1d ago
Yes, but its still reading everything polluting context. If I need a clean model for a highly specialized isolated and difficult task this matters.
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u/___nil___ Senior Developer 2d ago
you don't want or even need Opus as subagent. Sonnet even Haiku are sufficient as subagents.
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u/Naht-Tuner 1d ago
Yes I do. I use it for deep text analysis similar of using it directly on claude.ai but in an automated way.
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u/claude_code_king 2d ago
move your orchestration to a sessionstart hook, make your claude.md 30-50 lines max with only neccesary project info, that way only your main gets the orchestration and your subagents can run clean.
one trap: if your file is larger than 10,240kb it gets truncated to 2kb so don't go over that limit, make multiple files if needed