Claude Code Self-Audit Finds 3GB of Cruft in ~/.claude — Here's How to Clean It

A Reddit user fed Claude Code a forensic audit prompt to investigate why it felt sluggish. The tool found 3GB of accumulated cruft in ~/.claude and project-level CLAUDE.md files. After cleanup, the directory shrank to under 200MB.

The Prompt Used

Do a forensic audit of my ~/.claude directory and any project-level CLAUDE.md files in my workspace. I suspect accumulated cruft is degrading performance. Report:
For each finding, explain WHY it impacts performance (disk I/O at startup vs. context-window bloat vs. retry loops) and give me safe find / rm commands to clean it up. Don't execute anything — just report.

Findings in the User's Environment

• 2.6 GB in projects/ — 9,318 JSONL session transcripts across 172 project dirs, never purged. Causes disk I/O at startup.
• 170 MB in telemetry/ — 91 files of 1p_failed_events.* from a silent retry loop where telemetry couldn't reach the endpoint and kept buffering.
• 153 MB of file-history undo buffers.
• 3,095 stale todo JSON files — one per session/agent, ever.
• A 986-line CLAUDE.md, plus a 346-line one inside node_modules that loads whenever you cd nearby, causing context-window bloat.
• Stacked CLAUDE.md files in nested backend dirs adding up to ~900 lines of context just by being in a subdirectory.

What to Do

The user didn't share exact cleanup commands, but the audit report gave safe find/rm suggestions. You can craft your own based on the findings: remove old session transcripts from ~/.claude/projects/, delete telemetry retry buffers, prune undo buffers, and collapse or truncate bloated CLAUDE.md files — especially those in node_modules or deeply nested directories.