Two October 2026 preprints show coding agents identifying a stale CLAUDE.md or claiming to stop refactoring while their edits continue anyway. One study found Claude Code named the conflict in 79 of 80 runs yet mostly followed the stale file.
The episode covers the fix the authors tested, a one-sentence instruction about which source wins, and why it is not free during a half-finished migration. It also covers the limits of both studies, and why churn signals from version control matter more than the agent’s prose.