CLAUDE.md tightening pass now the session-workflow design has settled nf-vwrg ← Beads

Twinned from https://github.com/cfsh/ninefold/issues/420 by tools/beads/import_github.py's reconcile pass.

Filed at ninefold-b's wrap-up. Unclaimed and unlabelled — backlog.

#401 added ~+116 net lines to CLAUDE.md (after a −14 trim in 526d536). Every addition answers a review finding or one of Aedan's inline questions, so none of it is filler — but the PR's own thesis is that this file is re-read by every session on every tick, which makes its length a cost line rather than a style preference.

Aedan was asked to rule three times during the review and didn't, which was the right call mid-flight: the design was still moving. It has now landed, so a dedicated pass is possible without mixing prose edits into behavioural fixes — which is exactly why it was deferred each time.

Candidate targets, from the review's own residuals:

• "Cheap ticks" placement. It sits between - **Ticks are not free.** and - **Cron**:, so the poll section's bullet list reads as two lists with prose wedged between. Flagged twice by the reviewer, deferred twice. Cosmetic, but this is the section every session is asked to read carefully.
• The historical justifications. Several rules carry the measurement that motivated them (the ~$56/15h overnight burn, the #360 21-hour window, the eight-of-nine quiet-window count). They earn their place where a rule would otherwise get reinvented — Aedan's own note was *"a bit of contrast is useful, but IDK how much is helpful"*. Worth re-reading with fresh eyes now that nobody needs convincing.
• Duplication between the poll section and "Chunks, and wrapping one up." Termination is described in both.

The constraint that makes this delicate: the reviewer found the intake rule surviving verbatim in *four* places after #401 removed it, including the cold-start summary. Cutting the wrong contrast is how that happens. A rule that is likely to be reinvented needs its "don't reinvent this" clause; a rule nobody would think to invent does not.

Related: #396, #401, #414 (shell tier has no test harness), #418 (digest scoping), #419 (cron → Monitor).