length

Severity: warning; a note for a CLAUDE.md of 201 to 300 lines.

What it catches#

File is longer than the vendor recommends or reads.

A steering file longer than the tool that reads it recommends or loads. The thresholds come from the vendor docs: CLAUDE.md over 200 lines, SKILL.md over 500 lines, a Cursor rule over 500 lines, AGENTS.md over 32 KiB (Codex's project_doc_max_bytes, shared by every AGENTS.md from the root down), a Windsurf rule over 12,000 characters, and MEMORY.md past 200 lines or 25 KB. The message says which limit applies and what the tool does past it.

A CLAUDE.md of 201 to 300 lines is a note; the warning starts above 300, since 200 is a soft target. A SKILL.md that is also over the token guideline is reported once, by body-tokens, with both counts. A CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md in a template, example, fixture or temp folder, or inside a skill, is skipped: it belongs to a sample project or to the skill's reference material, not to the project being linted.

Why it matters#

CLAUDE.md over 200 lines, SKILL.md over 500, MEMORY.md past 200 lines or 25 KB and AGENTS.md past 32 KiB are either followed less reliably or cut off by the tool.

# CLAUDE.md

## Build and test
...

## Frontend conventions (src/web)
...120 lines about React, CSS modules and Storybook...

## Backend conventions (src/api)
...110 lines about handlers, migrations and OpenAPI...

## Infra (infra/)
...60 lines about Terraform modules...

# CLAUDE.md

## Build and test
...40 lines that apply everywhere...

<!-- .claude/rules/frontend.md -->
---
paths:
  - src/web/**
---
# Frontend conventions
...

How to fix#

For CLAUDE.md, move the parts that matter for one area into .claude/rules/<area>.md with a paths list. Imports (@docs/x.md) organise text but do not reduce the cost, because imported files load too. For SKILL.md, move reference tables and long examples into files next to it and link them. For AGENTS.md, shorten it or link to docs: nested AGENTS.md files share the same 32 KiB budget and are dropped first. For MEMORY.md, keep one line per entry and move detail into topic files.

Suppress or configure#

For one finding, put a comment on the line above it. The reason after -- is optional but worth writing:

<!-- asitis-disable-next-line length -- why this one is fine -->

For a whole file:

<!-- asitis-disable-file length -- why this file is an exception -->

For every file, turn it off or change its severity in .asitisrc.json:

{ "rules": { "length": "off" } }

length also takes thresholds, so a team that keeps a longer CLAUDE.md on purpose can raise the line:

{ "rules": { "length": ["warning", { "claudeMdLines": 300 }] } }

The options are claudeMdLines, skillMdLines, cursorRuleLines, codexBytes, windsurfChars and memoryIndexLines.

A .asitisrc.json overrides entry limits a change to some paths, and a baseline (asitis lint --format json --write-baseline) accepts today's findings so only new ones fail the build.

Source#

Claude Code docs: How Claude remembers your project, read on 14 October 2026.