ETH Zurich CLAUDE.md Study (Feb 2026)
- Entity ID:
ent-20260419-c0ead5acf93b - Type:
document - Scope:
shared - Status:
active - Aliases: ETH Zurich study, CLAUDE.md study
Description
February 2026 empirical study across 300 SWE-bench Lite + 138 AGENTbench tasks and 4 agents, establishing that LLM-generated context files decrease success rates and increase costs by ~20%. Claude Code was the only agent where even developer-written CLAUDE.md files failed to improve performance over no file at all. When existing docs were stripped, context files helped (+2.7%), confirming redundancy with existing documentation.
Key claims
- LLM-generated context files decrease success and raise cost ~20%
- CLAUDE.md practical ceiling is 60-100 lines