Your Claude Code rules are a liability you'll never audit

Any mature.claude/rules/ directory is full of instructions written for yesterday's model. Newer frontier models handle most of those defaults correctly on their own - but the old rules are still there, occupying context on every message, sometimes fighting the model's improved defaults. Nobody is auditing them because nobody agreed on what "auditing a prompt" even means. This post proposes one answer: every persistent rule carries a WHY tag (what default behavior the rule corrects) and a Retire when tag (the observable condition under which the rule no longer earns its presence.