🐛 If your Claude keeps "forgetting" your instructions, it's not you

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I spent the best part of a month wondering why my AI kept losing track of who I was. Turns out it wasn't me getting something wrong.

If you use Cowork and you've set up Global Instructions (Settings → Cowork → Global Instructions) to tell Claude who you are, how you like to work, your safety rules... you might have noticed they occasionally revert to an old version. You update them. They look right. Days later, they're back to something you wrote weeks ago.

I checked properly. It's a known bug, not user error:

Settings → Cowork → Global Instructions can silently revert to a stale saved version
It happened to me repeatedly, on two different devices
It's logged on Anthropic's own bug tracker, with several separate reports of the same thing
As of now, it's still unresolved

I've linked one of the open reports below if you want to see it for yourself 👉 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/40175

The workaround that's worked for me... don't rely on that Settings box alone. If you have a folder connected to your Cowork session, put your real instructions in a file there instead (a CLAUDE.md file, if that means anything to you). Claude reads that straight off your files every time, and it isn't affected by this particular bug.

Annoying to find. Easy enough to work around once you know.

Has this happened to you, or has your Claude been behaving itself? 👇

7 comments

🐛 If your Claude keeps "forgetting" your instructions, it's not you

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