This resonates with me. Sometimes I build up some artifacts within the context of a task, but these almost always get thrown away. There are primarily three reason I prefer a vanilla setup.

1. I have many and sometimes contradictory workflows: exploration, prototyping, bug fixing debugging, feature work, pr management, etc. When I'm prototyping, I want reward hacking, I don't care about tests or lint's, and it's the exact opposite when I manage prs.

2. I see hard to explain and quantify problems with over configuration. The quality goes down, it loses track faster, it gets caught in loops. This is totally anecdotal, but I've seen it across a number of projects. My hypothesis is that is related to attention, specifically since these get added to the system prompt, they pull the distribution by constantly being attended to.

3. The models keep getting better. Similar to 2, sometime model gains are canceled out by previously necessary instructions. I hear the anthropic folks clear their claude.md every 30 days or so to alleviate this.