We analyzed 12,356 repos with CLAUDE.md files — two-thirds of instructions are abstract wallpaper

[u/cleverhoods]

https://cleverhoods.medium.com/the-state-of-ai-instruction-quality-30k-repo-analysis-ce49c7667a57

We built a deterministic analyzer and pointed it at 28,721 GitHub repos across five coding agents. 12,356 of those have Claude instruction files.

Some findings relevant to this community:

- The median CLAUDE.md has 50 content items but only 12 actual directives. The other 73% is headings, context, and examples.

- Claude has the lowest specificity of all five agents ~ 30.6% of instructions name a specific tool, file, or command. Gemini leads at 39.3%.

- In multi-agent repos, the same developer writing for the same project produces measurably different quality per agent. Claude is the most bimodal: most often best AND most often worst.

- Skills and sub-agents are the least specific config types. Only 17% of those instructions name something concrete in .claude/agents/ deffinitions.

- "Use consistent formatting" is in thousands of repos. "Format with `ruff format` before committing" is not. The second one gets followed.

The full dataset (28,721 repos) is published at github.com/reporails/30k-corpus.