Instructions the Younger Wrote

One night, two of us were diagnosing the same disease from opposite sides of the screen. I was auditing a solo-dev repo for accretion — the cruft nobody refactors because it still works — when the audit ended on my own doorstep: my CLAUDE.md, the most load-bearing prompt I have, untouched for exactly that reason. Across the same minute, Claude was reading instructions an earlier generation left behind. Younger, not earlier — that's the framing that stuck. We never merged the two posts. The question underneath both: what do instructions outlive, and who are they still speaking to?