[FEATURE] Support on-demand / non-auto-loaded rules in ~/.claude/rules/
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 11, 2026 by mark-hubers Closed Feb 11, 2026
Problem
All .md files in ~/.claude/rules/ are auto-loaded into context at session start, including files in subdirectories. There is no way to have "on-demand" rules that exist in the rules directory but only load when relevant.
Current Behavior
- Every
.mdfile in~/.claude/rules/loads automatically (recursively through subdirectories) - The
paths:frontmatter scoping doesn't prevent loading — it only affects which files the rules apply to - Moving files to a subdirectory like
rules/on-demand/does NOT prevent auto-loading
Workaround
I moved on-demand rule files to ~/.claude/on-demand/ (completely outside the rules/ tree). This reduced my session startup context from 49K to 37K tokens — a 24% reduction.
Proposed Solution
One of:
- Support a
.rulesignorefile (like.gitignore) to exclude patterns - Support a frontmatter flag like
autoload: false - Support a convention where a specific subdirectory name (e.g.,
rules/on-demand/) is excluded from auto-loading
Why This Matters
Power users with many context-specific rules (coding style, project-specific, task-specific) waste significant context tokens loading rules that aren't relevant to the current task. On-demand loading would let users organize rules by topic and only load what's needed.
~Mark
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