I think I kind of have an idea what the author was doing, but not really.
Me neither; However, just like the rest I can only speculate (given the available information): I guess the following pieces provide a hint what's really going on here:
- "The quine is the quine" (one of the sub-headline of the article) and the meaning of the word "quine".
- Author's "scaffolding" tool which, once finished, had acquired the "knowledge"[1] how to add a CLAUDE.md baked instructions for a particular homemade framework (he's working on).
- Anthropic saying something like: no, stop; you cannot "copy"[1] Claude knowledge no matter how "non-serious" your scaffolding tool or your use-case is: as it might "shows", other Claude users, that there's a way to do similar things, maybe that time, for more "serious" tools.
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[1]. Excerpt from the Author's blog post: "I would love to see the face of that AI (Claude AI system backend) when it saw its own 'system prompt' language being echoed back to it (from Author's scaffolding tool: assuming it's complete and fully-functional at that time)."