Developer shares solution for Claude AI ignoring rules beyond 50-count threshold

A developer using Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex with a shared rule set encountered a specific limitation: once their rule count passed approximately 50, Claude began silently ignoring rules during frontend-heavy tasks. The issue appeared to stem from too much irrelevant context overwhelming the system.

Three attempted solutions

The developer tried several approaches to address the problem:

• Manually toggling rules before each task — effective but too tedious for regular use
• Splitting rules into "always-on" and "optional" folders — still resulted in too many rules being loaded
• Building a custom hook that reads each prompt and selects only 2-3 relevant rules — this approach actually worked

The working solution: a smart rule loader

The hook operates by scanning user prompts and matching them against rule descriptions using keyword-based matching (no API required). It then swaps files between active and inactive folders before Claude processes them, ensuring only relevant rules enter the context window.

Examples of how the system works:

• "write a react component" → loads react.md and typescript.md
• "fix my commit message" → loads commit.md and git.md
• Essential rules like essential.md and security.md always remain active

The developer has open-sourced the complete setup on GitHub at https://github.com/JSK9999/ai-nexus for others to use or examine.