Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

https://blog.dailydoseofds.com/p/anatomy-of-the-claude-folder

by freedomben • 4 months ago

627 265 4 months ago

blog.dailydoseofds.com

bagrow• 4 months ago

Here's a question that I hope is not too off-topic.

Do people find the nano-banana cartoon infographics to be helpful, or distracting? Personally, I'm starting to tire seeing all the little cartoon people and the faux-hand-drawn images.

Wouldn't Tufte call this chartjunk?

ramon156• 4 months ago

LinkedIn loves these, even if they're broken.

But they had already lost me at all the links, and the fact there's not a red wire through the entire article.

The first thing my eyes skimmed was:

CLAUDE.md: Claude’s instruction manual
This is the most important file in the entire system. When you start a Claude Code session, the first thing it reads is CLAUDE.md. It loads it straight into the system prompt and keeps it in mind for the entire conversation.

No it's not. Claude does not read this until it is relevant. And if it does, it's not SOT. So no, it's argumentatively not the most important file.

SV_BubbleTime3• 4 months ago

Maybe. But I kind of view LinkedIn as a social network for people who only by the grace of a couple better decisions are talking about real business and not multilevel marketing schemes… but otherwise use the same themes and terminologies.

Like mostly people who have confused luck and success, or business acumen for religion.

So I wouldn’t use LinkedIn as a positive data point of what’s hot.

frotaur• 4 months ago

Are you certain? My understanding was that this is automatically injected in the context, and in my experience that's how it worked. I never see 'ReadFile(claude.md)', and yet claude is aware of some conventions I put in there.

push0ret• 4 months ago

I haven't come around any AI generated imagery in documents / slides that adds any value. It's more the opposite, they stand out like a sore thumb and often even reduce usability since text cannot be copied. Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI.

GaggiX• 4 months ago

It may be survivorship bias, you only notice the AI ones that are bad.

linux2647• 4 months ago

Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI

Feels like generated AI art like this is modern clipart

simonw• 4 months ago

My eye has started skipping past them, even though they're often quite useful if you engage with them.

I think the problem is that they're uninformative slop often enough that I've subconsciously determined they aren't worth risking attention time on.

browningstreet• 4 months ago

I think it's fine. As someone who blogged a lot, the instant visual differentiation among articles offered by the art within is actually valuable.

eitally• 4 months ago

I am a victim of AI-documentation-slop at work, and the result is that I've become far more "Tuftian" in my preferences than ever before. In the past, I was a fan of beautiful design and sometimes liked nice colors and ornaments. Now, though, I've a fan of sparse design and relevant data (not information -- lots of information is useless slop). I want content that's useful and actionable, and the majority of the documents many of my peers create using Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT are fluffy broadsheets of irrelevant filler, rarely containing insights and calls-to-action.

So yes, it's chartjunk.

fny• 4 months ago

This is equivalent to "do people find PowerPoint to be helpful or distracting." Sometimes yes, mostly no.

In this case, I'd say helpful because I didn't have to read the article at all to understand what was being communicated.

heliumtera3• 4 months ago

No. It adds nothing so nothing is preferred

freedomben3• 4 months ago

Most of the time I find them distracting, and sometimes a huge negative on the article. In this particular article though, they're well done and relevant, and I think they add quite a bit. It's a highly personal opinion kind of thing though for sure.

SV_BubbleTime3• 4 months ago

The first one is actually quite good.

Some of the others, I don’t feel like added value, but I agree that these are some of the best of a practice that I agreed does not add a ton of value typically

elcapitan• 4 months ago

When I see AI images, I skip them, and most likely, the entire article. They're a better warning sign than the ones hidden in the text.

SV_BubbleTime3• 4 months ago

Yeah, I’ve been considering this. They’re going to start removing em dashes, which currently is a surefire way to detect AI text.

Let’s say lose those and using emojis as bullet points. It’s going to be a lot harder to detect.

btucker• 4 months ago

It's not necessarily an AI-generated infographics issue, it's that these aren't good infographics. The graphic part is adding minimal value.

matsemann• 4 months ago

I never trust them to actually be correct. Aka they're probably worse than useless.

randusername• 4 months ago

Tufte is evergreen. Zinsser is another.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?

On Writing Well (Zinsser)

TheRoque• 4 months ago

So that's what "software engineering" has become nowadays ? Some cargo cult basically. Seriously all of this gives red flag. No statements here are provable. It's just like langhchain that was praised and then everyone realized it's absolute dog water. Just like MCP too. The job in 2026 is really sad.

graypegg2• 4 months ago

I think I'm finding a pretty good niche for myself honestly. IMO, Software engineering is more so splitting into different professions based on the work is produces.

This sort of "prompt and pray" flow really works for people, as in they can make products and money, however, I do think the people that succeed today also would've reached for no-code tools 5 years ago and seen similar success. It's just faster and more comprehensive now. I think the general theme of the products remains the same though; not un-important or worthless, but it tends to be software that has effects that say INSIDE the realm of software. I feel like there's always been a market for that, as it IS important, it's just not WORTH the time and money to the right people to "engineer" those tools. A lot of SaaS products filled that niche for many years.

While it's not a way I want to work, I am also becoming comfortable with respecting that as a different profession for producing a certain brand of software that does have value, and that I wasn't making before. The intersection of that is opportunity I'm missing out on; no fault to anyone taking it!

The software engineer that writes the air traffic avoidance system for a plane better take their job seriously, understand every change they make, and be able to maintain software indefinitely. People might not care a ton about how their sales tracking software is engineered, but they really care about the engineering of the airplane software.

baal80spam• 4 months ago

prompt and pray

This is a brilliant reimagining of the old and trusted PnP acronym.

sarchertech• 4 months ago

I think this is mostly right. The primary difference is that with no code you had to change platforms, but the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.

It shouldn’t be, but it’s going to take some catastrophic events to convince people that we have to work to make sure we understand the systems we’re building and keep everything from devolving into vibe coded slop.

sunir3• 4 months ago

When was it not a cargo cult?

donperignon• 4 months ago

trial, pray, error, trial ... such a waste of energy and talent

dinkumthinkum4• 4 months ago

I would say, yes its pretty sad. The hypers are kind of gassing themselves up because they, unironically, think they are using LLMs in some special way and they are going to win. I think the industry is ramping up to speed-run into some Tai Lopez type situation.,

manudaro2• 4 months ago

The .claude folder structure reminds me of how Terraform organizes state files. Smart move putting conversation history in Json rether than some propiertary format, makes it trivial to grep through old conversations or build custom analysis tools.

unshavedyak• 4 months ago

Claude itself will grep through old conversations so it’s handy that Claude understands too

manudaro2• 4 months ago

Ha yeah that makes sense. Having the AI read its own conversation history in a format it already understands is a nice side effect of keeping it in plain Json.

galoisscobi• 4 months ago

Most people either write too much or too little. Here’s what works.
Two folders, not one

Why post AI slop here?

rvz• 4 months ago

"Thinking" is about to get even harder to do for most grifters with newsletters to sell.

jwilliams2• 4 months ago

Simply put: whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow.

No.

CLAUDE.md is just prompt text. Compaction rewrites prompt text.

If it matters, enforce it in other ways.

taormina• 4 months ago

Exactly!

hbarka2• 4 months ago

CLAUDE.md survives compaction.

jwilliams2• 4 months ago

It's meant to, yes.

BoredPositron• 4 months ago

Alchemy.

einrealist2• 4 months ago

"Vibe prompting"

exitb• 4 months ago

I’m seeing this more and more, where people build this artificial wall you supposedly need to climb to try agentic coding. That’s not the right way to start at all. You should start with a fresh .claude, empty AGENTS.md, zero skills and MCP and learn to operate the thing first.

heliumtera3• 4 months ago

Operate == me send https post and pray for the best

dietr1ch• 4 months ago

That's the goal, keep spending tokens and claim you are super productive because of it

jameshart• 4 months ago

Yes, but as soon as you start checking in and sharing access to a project with other developers these things become shared.

Working out how to work on code on your own with agentic support is one thing. Working out how to work on it as a team where each developer is employing agentic tools is a whole different ballgame.

georgeburdell• 4 months ago

In my own group, agentic coding made sharing and collaboration go out the window because Claude will happily duplicate a bunch of code in a custom framework

sceptic123• 4 months ago

But why is it different? Why does it need to be? I don't write code the same as other devs so why would/should I use AI the same?

Is this a hangover from when the tools were not as good?

freedomben3• 4 months ago

I totally agree with you that this not the right way to start. But, in my experience, the more you use the tool the more of a "feel" you get for it, and knowing how all these different pieces work and line up can be quite useful (though certainly not mandatory). It's been immensely frustrating to me how difficult it is to find all this info with all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.

Isn't this article just another one in that same drawer?

What actually belongs in CLAUDE.md - Write: - Import conventions, naming patterns, error handling styles

Then just a few lines below:

Don’t write: - Anything that belongs in a linter or formatter config

The article overall seems filled with internal inconsistencies, so I'm not sure this article is adding much beyond "This is what an LLM generated after I put the article title with some edits".

Fishkins4• 4 months ago

I agree with most of this, with one important exception: you should have some form of sandboxing in place before running any local AI agent. The easiest way to do that is with .claude/settings.json[0].

This is important no matter how experienced you are, but arguable the most important when you don't know what you're doing.

0: or if you don't want to learn about that, you can use Claude Code Web

post-it• 4 months ago

The default sandboxing works fine for me. It asks before running any command, and I can whitelist directories for reading and non-compound commands.

sroussey• 4 months ago

Do people really run claude and other clis like this outside a container??

gawa• 4 months ago

The part about permissions with settings.json [0] is laughable. Are we really supposed to list all potential variations of harmful commands? In addition to the `Bash(cat ./.env)`, we would also need to add `Bash(cat .env)`, Bash(tail ./.env)`, Bash(tail .env)`, `Bash(head ./.env)`, `Bash(sed '' ./.env)`, and countless others... while at the same time we allow something like `npm` to run?

I know the deny list is only for automatically denying, and that non-explicitly allowed command will pause, waiting for user input confirmation. But still it reminds me of the rationale the author of the Pi harness [1] gave to explain why there will be no permission feature built-in in Pi (emphasis mine):

If you look at the security measures in other coding agents, *they're mostly security theater*. As soon as your agent can write code and run code, it's pretty much game over. [...] If you're uncomfortable with full access, run pi inside a container or use a different tool if you need (faux) guardrails.

As you mentioned, this is a big feature of Claude Code Web (or Codex/Antigravity or whatever equivalent of other companies): they handle the sand-boxing.

[0] https://blog.dailydoseofds.com/i/191853914/settingsjson-perm...

[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...

hmokiguess• 4 months ago

with Anthropic already starting to sell "Claude Certified Architect" exams and a "Partner Network Program", I think a lot of this stuff is around building a side industry on top of it unfortunately

beyonddream• 4 months ago

.claude has become the new dotfiles. And what do people do when they want to start using dotfiles ? they copy other’s dotfiles and same is happening here :)

silverwind3• 4 months ago

.claude is likely to contain secrets and also contains garbage like cache etc, if it is shared, it should only be partially shared.

pgwhalen• 4 months ago

Who is building an artificial wall? Maybe I skimmed the post too fast, but it doesn't seem like this information is being presented as "you have to know/do this before you start agentic engineering", just "this is some stuff to know."

Aurornis• 4 months ago

This article isn't saying you must set up a big .claude folder before you start. It repeats several times that it's important to start small and keep it short.

It's also not targeted at first-timers getting their first taste of AI coding. It's a guide for how to use these tools to deal with frustrations you will inevitably encounter with AI coding.

Though really, many of the complaints about AI coding on HN are written by beginners who would also benefit from a simple .claude configuration that includes their preferences and some guidelines. A frequent complaint from people who do drive-by tests of AI coding tools before giving up is that the tools aren't reading their mind or the tools keep doing things the user doesn't want. Putting a couple lines into AGENTS.md or the .claude folder can fix many of those problems quickly.

nunez3• 4 months ago

This matters for big engineering teams who want to put _some_ kind of guardrails around Claude that they can scale out.

For example, I have a rule [^0] that instructs Claude to never start work until some pre-conditions are met. This works well, as it always seems to check these conditions before doing anything, every turn.

I can see security teams wanting to use this approach to feel more comfortable about devs doing things with agentic tools without worrying _as much_ about them wreaking havoc (or what they consider "havoc").

As well, as someone who's just _really_ getting started with agentic dev, spending time dumping how I work into rules helped Claude not do things I disapprove of, like not signing off commits with my GPG key.

That said, these rules will never be set in stone, at least not at first.

[^0]: https://github.com/carlosonunez/bash-dotfiles/blob/main/ai/c...

bisonbear2• 4 months ago

I'm also thinking on how we can put guardrails on Claude - but more around context changes. For example, if you go and change AGENTS.md, that affects every dev in the repo. How do we make sure that the change they made is actually beneficial? and thinking further, how do we check that it works on every tool/model used by devs in the repo? does the change stay stable over time?

dominotw3• 4 months ago

NO EXCEPTIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

cute that you think cluade gives a rat ass about this.

stronglikedan• 4 months ago

Seems maybe you're just not the target audience for this article.

gck13• 4 months ago

I'd also go even further and say that you likely should never install ANY skill that you didn't create yourself (i mean, guided claude to create it for you works too), or "forked" an existing one and pulled only what you need.

Everyone's workflow is different and nobody knows which workflow is the right one. If you turn your harness into a junk drawer of random skills that get auto updated, you introduce yet another layer of nondeterminism into it, and also blow up your context window.

The only skill you should probably install instead of maintaining it yourself is playwright-cli, but that's pretty much it.

hombre_fatal2• 4 months ago

I had an issue with playwright MCP where only one Claude Code instance could be using it at a time, so I switched to Claude's built-in /chrome MCP.

In practice, I also find it more useful that the Chrome MCP uses my current profile since I might want Claude to look at some page I'm already logged in to.

I'm not very sophisticated here though. I mainly use use browser MCP to get around the fact that 30% of servers block agent traffic like Apple's documentation.

s900mhz• 4 months ago

Yes this is the path I’m taking. Experiment, build your own toolbox whether it’s hand rolled skills or particular skills you pull out from other public repos. Then maintain your own set.

You do not want to log in one day to find your favorite workflow has changed via updates.

Then again this is all personal preference as well.

dance2die• 4 months ago

I'd also go even further and say that you likely should never install ANY skill that you didn't create yourself

Ignore original comment below, as the post is technical so is the parent comment: for techies

---

That applies to tech users only.

Non-tech users starting to use Claude code and won't care to get the job done

Claude introduced skills is to bring more non-tech users to CLI as a good way to get your feet wet.

Not everyone will go for such minute tweaks.

smj-edison• 4 months ago

I use vanilla Claude Code, and I've never looked that much into skills, so I'm curious: how do you know when it's time to add a new skill?

butlike• 4 months ago

It's not as bucolic as this when trying to get an org on board. We're currently very open to using Claude, but the unknowns are still the unknowns, so the guardrails the `.claude` folder provides gives us comfort when gaining familiarity with the tool.

ymolodtsov• 4 months ago

Peter Steinberger himself says he's just chatting with AI instead of coming up with crazy coding workflows.

abtinf• 4 months ago

Seriously, just use plan mode first and you get like 90% of the way there, with CC launching subagents that will generally do the right thing anyway.

IMHO most of this “customize your config to be more productive” stuff will go away within a year, obsoleted by improved models and harnesses.

Just like how all the lessons for how to use LLMs in code from 1-2 years ago are already long forgotten.

JohnMakin4• 4 months ago

I loved all the dumb prompt “hacks” back then like “try saying please”

keeganpoppen• 4 months ago

this is true, but i think people are best off starting with SOME project that gives users an idea of how to organize and think about stuff. for me, this is gastown, and i now have what has gotta be the most custom gastown install out there. could not agree more that your ai experience must be that which you build for yourself, not a productized version that portends to magically agentize your life. i think this is the real genius of gastown— not how it works, but that it does work and yegge built it from his own mind. so i’ve taken the same lesson and run very, very far with it, while also going in a totally different direction in many ways. but it is a work of genius, and i respect the hell out of him for putting it out there.

dominotw3• 4 months ago

empty AGENTS.md, zero skills

which is basically every setup because claude sucks at calling skills and forget everything in claude.md with a few seconds.

girvo• 4 months ago

Right? I laughed when I read this:

If you tell Claude to always write tests before implementation, it will. If you say “never use console.log for error handling, always use the custom logger module,” it will respect that every time.

It just isn't true lol

silverwind3• 4 months ago

Yep, it regularily ignores CLAUDE.md files. It seems these files are not weighted high enough vs. the prompt.

bonoboTP• 4 months ago

2 months ago I built (with Claude) a quite advanced Python CLI script and Claude Skill that searches and filters the Claude logs to access information from other sessions or from the same session before context compaction. But today Claude Code has a builtin feature to search its logs and will readily do it when needed.

My point is, these custom things are often short lived band-aids, and may not be needed with better default harnesses or smarter future models.

nzoschke3• 4 months ago

This is very insightful thanks for sharing.

I’ve been developing and working on dev tools for more than 15 years. I’ve never seen things evolve so rapidly.

Experiment, have fun and get things done, but don’t get too sure or attached to your patches.

It’s very likely the models and harnesses will keep improving around the gaps you see.

I’ve seen most of my AGENTS.md directives and custom tools fade away too, as the agents get better and better at reading the code and running the tests and feeding back on themselves.

Synthetic73462• 4 months ago

I wish all model providers would converge on a standard set of files, so I could switch easily from Claude to Codex to Cursor to Opencode depending on the situation

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

Issue is that both harness and specific model matters a lot in what type of instruction works best, if you were to use Anthrophic's models together with the best way to do prompting with Codex and GPT models, you'd get a lot worse results compared to if you use GPT models with Codex, prompted in the way GPTs react best to them.

I don't think people realize exactly how important the specific prompts are, with the same prompt you'd get wildly different results for different models, and when you're iterating on a prompt (say for some processing), you'd do different changes depending on what model is being used.

freedomben3• 4 months ago

Having experimented with soft-linking AGENTS.md into CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md, this lines up well with my experience. I now just let each time maintain it's own files and don't try to combine them. If it's something like my custom "## Agent Instructions" then I just copy-pasta and it's not been hard, and since that section is mostly identical I just treat AGENTS.md as the canonical and copy/paste any changes over to the others.

dbmikus• 4 months ago

Are there any good guides on how to write prompt files tailored to different agents?

Would also be interested in examples of a CLAUDE.md file that works well in Claude, but works poorly with Codex.

heliumtera3• 4 months ago

And why would they ever let switch?

Synthetic73462• 4 months ago

Interoperability means that people could switch to them as well

0x500x79• 4 months ago

Agree, for now im using dotagents by sentry to handle a lot of this.

conception• 4 months ago

You can just use a single agents.md and have claude.md use it. Then symlink or sync skills/etc between .folders. It’s not perfect but works.

mememememememo5• 4 months ago

It is early browser days. It is good they are not converging. That is how we got AJAX (now Fetch) and even JS.

b-karl• 4 months ago

Cursor supports all the Claude file patterns, including plugins and marketplaces. We leverage that to support both Claude and Cursor with same instructions and skills

phyzix5761• 4 months ago

Is there a completely free coding assistant agent that doesn't require you to give a credit card to use it?

I recently tried IntelliJ for Kotlin development and it wanted me to give a credit card for a 30 day trial. I just want something that scans my repo and I tell it the changes I want and it does it. If possible, it would also run the existing tests to make sure its changes don't break anything.

sunir3• 4 months ago

Qwen code has a free tier

Opencoder is bring your own model.

You get what you pay for so good luck.

bhaak• 4 months ago

Gemini Code Assist has a free tier.

You log in with your Goggle account.

bityard• 4 months ago

There are lots! Too many to cover in a single HN comment, and this space is evolving rapidly so I encourage you to look around.

While the coding assistants are pretty much universally free, you still need to connect them to a model. The model tokens generally cost something once you've gone past a certain quota.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but if you have a Google account, Gemini Code Assist had a quite generous "free tier" that I used for a while and found it do be pretty decent.

ontouchstart2• 4 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533611

It is fun to use.

ontouchstart2• 4 months ago

Just found out this and will watch myself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RLIlNWv1xo

63stack• 4 months ago

The article starts off really weak:

Claude Code users typically treat the .claude folder like a black box. They know it exists. They’ve seen it appear in their project root. But they’ve never opened it, let alone understood what every file inside it does.

I know we are living in a post-engineering world now, but you can't tell me that people don't look at PRs anymore, or their own diffs, at least until/if they decide to .gitignore .claude.

sunir3• 4 months ago

You’re assuming most people using Claude code are senior engineers.

politelemon• 4 months ago

And that we're living in a post engineering world.

fogzen• 4 months ago

I don't. I have Claude do all my PR reviews, running in a daily loop in the morning. The truth is an LLM is better at code review than the average programmer.

I'm a senior engineer who has been shipping code since before GitHub and PR reviews was a thing. Thankfully LLMs have freed me from being asked to read other people's shit code for hours every day.

dinkumthinkum4• 4 months ago

It "freed" you. :) That's an interesting way to put it.

groby_b• 4 months ago

100% AI slop. All the way to "The Key Insight".

rdevilla• 4 months ago

The fuck? What's next, configuring maven and pom.xml? At least XML is unambiguous, well specified, and doesn't randomly refuse to compile 2% of the time..

forgotusername6• 4 months ago

If these different agents could agree on a standard location that would be great. The specs are almost the same for .github and Claude but Claude won't even look at the .github location.

dmix• 4 months ago

There already is, it's ~/.agents and you use symlinks for .claude, and the dir structure is pretty similar and anything you want to reuse across models is pretty standardized, just not formalized.

submeta• 4 months ago

Tangential: The image with the heading "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder" is nicely made, anyone knows what tool is used for it?

saadn92• 4 months ago

The claim that "whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In practice CLAUDE.md is a suggestion, not a contract. Complex tasks and compaction will dilute the use of CLAUDE.md, especially once the context window runs out.

dgb23• 4 months ago

This is correct. All of these .md files are just blobs of text that the LLM matches against. They might increase the likelihood of something happening or not happening.

They look to me like people actually want to build deterministic workflows, but blobs of text are the wrong approach for that. The right tool is code that controls the agent through specific states and validates the tool calls step by step.

chrisweekly2• 4 months ago

That's not quite right. Claude treats certain md files very differently from others. See eg

https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery

mememememememo5• 4 months ago

You can create a control loop that runs all tests and then runs a claude session to fix.

Ultimately you can't force claude to solve any problem but you could make it so constraints are kept.

A simple way is a git hook thay runs all the deterministic things you care about.

robertfw• 4 months ago

Yeah, the moment I saw this I knew this article was not going to be very useful.

Getting claude to follow your guidance files consistently is a bit maddening.

PetrBrzyBrzek• 4 months ago

Why is this AI slop article first on HN?

BuildItBusk• 4 months ago

I think this does a great job of explaining the .claude directories in a beginner friendly way. And I don’t necessarily read it as “you have to do all this, before you start”.

It has a few issues with outdated advice (e.g. commands has been merged with skills), but overall I might use share it with co-workers who needs an introduction to the concept.

frizlab• 4 months ago

Completely tangential, but can we please stop putting one million files at the root of the project which have nothing to do with the project? Can we land on a convention like, idk, a `.meta` folder (not the meta company, the actual word), or whatever, in which all of these Claude.md, .swift-version, Code-of-Conduct.md, Codeowners, Contributing.md, .rubocop.yml, .editorconfig, etc. files would go??

flurdy• 4 months ago

I was glad when linux went with the .config standard for most dotfiles.

qiine2• 4 months ago

Now if only it would be respected more often!

Titled86• 4 months ago

you don't like seeing 50 random dot files at the repo root you have to scroll past when trying to get to the readme in GitHub?

akalidz• 4 months ago

interesting

dataviz1000• 4 months ago

Claude Fast has very good alternate documentation for this. [0] I don't understand the hate for defining .claude/ . It is quite easy to have the main agent write the files. Then rather doing one shot coding, instead iterate quickly updating .claude/ I'm at the point where .claude/ makes copies of itself, performs the task, evaluates, and updates itself. I'm not coding code, I'm coding .claude/ which does everything else. This is also a mechanism for testing .claude, agents, and instructions which would be useful for sharing and reuse in an organization.

[0] https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery

chrisweekly2• 4 months ago

Great link, thanks for sharing! Read and bookmarked it.

TLDR "CLAUDE.md isn't documentation for Claude to read - it's an operating system for Claude to run. Define behavior, delegate knowledge to skills, and build a system that improves itself over time."

brandnewideas2• 4 months ago

I'm in absolute disbelief at the existence of this website. Idiocracy is at an all-time high.

dinkumthinkum4• 4 months ago

Yes. I think people that think like us are in a major minority, ironically. It's a sinking ship.

giancarlostoro• 4 months ago

The real wall I never see people talking about is, yes, you can tell Claude to update whatever file you want, but you have to be aware that if it's .claude/INSTRUCTIONS.md or CLAUDE.md that you need to tell Claude to re-read those files because it wrote the contents but its not treating it as if it were fresh instructions, it will run off whatever the last time it read that file was, so if it never existed, it will not know. I believe Claude puts those instructions in a very specific part of its context window.

sergiotapia• 4 months ago

In my experience fewer skills is significantly better.

When you have this performative folder of skills the AI wastes a bunch of tool calls, gets confused, doesn't get to the meat of the problem.

beware!

Normal_gaussian• 4 months ago

Yeah skills get loaded into context which in effect pollutes context.

jonnycoder• 4 months ago

Yea I went through my global claude skills and /context yesterday because claude was performing terribly. I deleted a bunch of stuff including memory and anecdotally got better results later on in the day.

persedes• 4 months ago

huh neat, somehow completely missed out on the rules/ + path filters as a way to extend CLAUDE.md

gigapotential• 4 months ago

Nice! Article didn't mention but ~/.claude/plans is where it stores plan md file when running in plan mode. I find it useful to open or backup plans from the directory.

cloverich• 4 months ago

Feel little like this is generated and not based on experience. Claude.md should be short. Typescript strict mode isnt a gotcha, itll figure that out on its own easily, imo omit things like that. People put far too much stuff in claude, just a few lines and links to docs is all it needs. You can also @Agents.md and put everything there instead. Dont skills supercede commands? Subagents are good esp if you specify model, forked memory, linked skills, etc. Always ask what you can optimize after you see claude thrashing, then figure out how to encode that (or refactor your scripts or code choices).

Always separate plan from implementation and clear context between, its the build up of context that makes it bad ime.

hombre_fatal2• 4 months ago

Dont skills supercede commands?

Don't skills sit in context while custom slash commands are only manually invoked?

The difference isn't clear to me, especially since, upon googling it right now, I see that skills can also be invoked with a /slash.

wonnage• 4 months ago

They’re the same thing now except that skills can have some frontmatter to allow the agent to execute them automatically.

esses• 4 months ago

The intro paragraph sounds exactly like Claude’s phrasing. So much so that I couldn’t read the rest of the article because I assumed I could just ask Claude about the topic.

jmtulloss• 4 months ago

Exactly this. If there is some nuance in the article vs what Claude can tell you, then that's worthwhile. This article is just generated with a specific prompt on style but very little content editing. What's the point? It's like posting the results of a Google search. The prompt would have been more interesting.

It's not against the rules to post AI slop here, and I don't necessarily think it should be. But I do wonder how we value written content going forward. There's value to taste and style and editing and all the other human things... there's very little value in the actual words themselves. We'll figure it out.

polynomial• 4 months ago

"The gap is larger than most people realize" is a a dead giveaway.

functional_dev• 4 months ago

TLDR https://vectree.io/c/anatomy-of-the-claude-folder

mark_l_watson• 4 months ago

Off topic but earlier today I asked Gemini to read this article and advise how to do the same things for OpenCode. I am fascinated with trying to get good performance from small local models.

dewey• 4 months ago

Building your AI agent "toolkit" is becoming the equivalent of the perfect "productivity" setup where you spend your time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos telling you how to be productive and creating habits and rituals...only to be overtaken by a person with a simple paper list of tasks that they work through.

Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best in my experience.

pfortuny• 4 months ago

Emacs init file bikeshedding comes to mind…

wilkystyle• 4 months ago

but now you can build your AI agent toolkit to work on your init file for you

obsidianbases1• 4 months ago

Lots of money being made by luring people into this trap.

The reality is that if you actually know what you want, and can communicate it well (where the productivity app can be helpful), then you can do a lot with AI.

My experience is that most people don't actually know what they want. Or they don't understand what goes into what they want. Asking for a plan is a shortcut to gaining that understanding.

thbb123• 4 months ago

Or, as I like to put it: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to figure what is it I really want. And still, quite often, I think in terms of the programming language I'm used to and the library I'm familiar with.

So, to really create something new that I care about, LLMs don't help much.

They are still useful for plenty of other tasks.

luisgvv• 4 months ago

This is why the grill me skill went viral - https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/grill-me/SKIL...

ModernMech• 4 months ago

Problem is they don’t know how to express themselves and many people, especially those interested in tech, don’t want to learn.

I can’t tell you how many times I have a CS student in my office for advising and they tell me they only want to take technical courses, because anything reading or writing or psychology or history based is “soft”, unrelated to their major, and a waste of their time.

I’ve spent years telling them critical reading and expressive writing skills are very important to being a functioning adult, but they insist what they need to know can only be found in the Engineering college.

gffrd• 4 months ago

My experience is that most people don't actually know what they want. Or they don't understand what goes into what they want.

1000%. This is why people whose job it was to figure out how to make a thing are thriving with AI tools, and those who operate in the conceptual/abstract are flailing and frustrated with it. (it really is a mirror in this case, and the frustration they have is unknowingly directed at themselves)

ctoth• 4 months ago

Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best in my experience.

Working on an unspecified codebase of unknown size using unconfigured tooling with unstated goals found that less configuration worked better than more.

sockgrant• 4 months ago

if you work on platforms, frameworks, tools that are public knowledge, then yeah. If there’s nothing unique to your project or how to write code in it, build it, deploy it, operate it, yeah.

But for some projects there will be things Claude doesn’t know about, or things that you repeatedly want done a specific way and don’t want to type it in every prompt.

dominotw3• 4 months ago

example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501214

thisrobot• 4 months ago

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.

lanthissa• 4 months ago

its not though if you're working in a massive codebase or on a distributed system that has many interconnected parts.

skills that teach the agent how to pipe data, build requests, trace them through a system and datasources, then update code based on those results are a step function improvement in development.

ai has fundamentally changed how productive i am working on a 10m line codebase, and i'd guess less than 5% of that is due to code gen thats intended to go to prod. Nearly all of it is the ability to rapidly build tools and toolchains to test and verify what i'm doing.

sillysaurusx• 4 months ago

But... plain Claude does that. At least for my codebase, which is nowhere close to your 10m line. But we do processing on lots of data (~100TB) and Claude definitely builds one-off tools and scripts to analyze it, which works pretty great in my experience.

What sort of skills are you referring to?

ijustlovemath• 4 months ago

Even the most complex distributed systems can be understood with the context windows we have. Short of 1M+ loc, and even then you could use documentation to get a more succinct view of the whole thing.

cornholio3• 4 months ago

Let me give you a counterexample. I'm working on a product for the national market, and i need to do all financial tasks, invoicing, submit to national fiscal databse etc. through a local accounting firm. So i integrate their API in the backend; this is a 100% custom API developed by this small european firm, with a few dozen restful enpoints supporting various accounting operations, and I need to use it programmatically to maintain sync for legal compliance. No LLM ever heard of it. It has a few hundred KB of HTML documentation that Claude can ingest perfectly fine and generate a curl command for, but i don't want to blow my token use and context on every interaction.

So I naturally felt the need to (tell Claude to) build a MCP for this accounting API, and now I ask it to do accounting tasks, and then it just does them. It's really ducking sweet.

Another thing I did was, after a particularly grueling accounting month close out, I've told Claude to extract the general tasks that we accomplished, and build a skill that does it at the end of the month, and now it's like having a junior accountant in at my disposal - it just DOES the things a professional would charge me thousands for.

So both custom project MCPs and skills are super useful in my experience.

endofreach• 4 months ago

What exactly does it do that a professional would charge you thousands for?

(I'm genuinely asking)

mememememememo5• 4 months ago

Your use is maybe more vanilla than you think. I think you are just getting shit done. Which is good.

Claude and an mcp and skill is plain to me. Writing your own agent connecting to LLMs to try to be better than Claude code, using Ralph loops and so on is the rabbit hole.

zormino• 4 months ago

That's what you should be doing. Start from plain Claude, then add on to it for your specific use cases where needed. Skills are fantastic if used this way. The problem is people adding hundreds or thousands of skills that they download and will never use, but just bloat the entire system and drown out a useful system.

LuxBennu• 4 months ago

this is exactly how i use it too. i have a few custom MCP servers running on a mac mini homelab, one for permission management, one for infra gateway stuff. the key thing i learned is keeping CLAUDE.md updated with what each MCP server actually does and what inputs it expects. otherwise claude code will either not use the tool when it should, or call it with wrong params and waste a bunch of back and forth. once you document it properly it really does feel like having a team member who just knows how your stack works. the accounting use case is a great example because nobody else's generic tooling would ever cover that.

jp57• 4 months ago

This. At work I have described this phenomenon as the equivalent of tinkering with the margins and fonts in your word processor instead of just writing your paper.

chatmasta3• 4 months ago

All I want is for my agent to save me time, and to become a _compounding_ multiplier for my output. As a PM, I mostly want to use it for demos and prototypes and ideation. And I need it to work with my fractured attention span and saturated meeting schedule, so compounding is critical.

I’m still new to this, but the first obvious inefficiency I see is that I’m repeating context between sessions, copying .md files around, and generally not gaining any efficiency between each interaction. My only priority right now is to eliminate this repetition so I can free up buffer space for the next repetition to be eliminated. And I don’t want to put any effort into this.

How are you guys organizing this sort of compounding context bank? I’m talking about basic information like “this is my job, these are the products I own, here’s the most recent docs about them, here’s how you use them, etc.” I would love to point it to a few public docs sites and be done, but that’s not the reality of PM work on relatively new/instable products. I’ve got all sorts of docs, some duplicated, some outdated, some seemingly important but actually totally wrong… I can’t just point the agent at my whole Drive and ask it to understand me.

Should I tell my agent to create or update a Skill file every time I find myself repeating the same context more than twice? Should I put the effort into gathering all the best quality docs into a single Drive folder and point it there? Should I make some hooks to update these files when new context appears?

tern2• 4 months ago

It's too early. People are trying all of the above. I use all of the above, specifically:

- A well-structured folder of markdown files that I constantly garden. Every sub-folder has a README. Every files has metadata in front-matter. I point new sessions at the entry point to this documentation. Constantly run agents that clean up dead references, update out of date information, etc. Build scripts that deterministically find broken links. It's an ongoing battle.

- A "continuation prompt" skill, that prompts the agent to collect all relevant context for another agent to continue

- Judicious usage of "memory"

- Structured systems made out of skills like GSD (Get Shit Done)

- Systems of "quality gate" hooks and test harnesses

For all of these, I have the agent set them up and manage them, but I've yet to find a context-management system that just works. I don't think we understand the "physics" of context management yet.

makerdiety• 4 months ago

Sounds like you need OpenClaw's assistance.

nzoschke3• 4 months ago

The best thing you can do is help build and maintain high quality docs.

Great docs help you, your agents, your team and your customers.

If you’re confused and the agent can’t figure it out reliably how can anyone?

Easier said than done of course. And harder now than ever if the products are rapidly changing from agentic coding too.

One of my only universal AGENTS.md rules is:

Write the pull request title and description as customer facing release notes.

tern2• 4 months ago

Ah, thanks so much for this question. I ended up building a tool that agent can use to track 'compounding' in my corpus of .markdown files. Keep iterating and thinking about it, and you may find you can do the same for your process.

andrei_says_• 4 months ago

Bikeshedding seems to have shifted from code to LLMs which is a step further.

We used to have the very difficult task of producing working scalable maintainable code describing complex systems which do what we need them to do.

Now on top of it we have the difficult task of producing this code using constantly mutating complex nondeterministic systems.

We are the circus bear riding a bicycle on a high wire now being asked to also spin plates and juggle chainsaws.

Maybe singularity means that time sunk into managing LLMs is equal to time needed to manually code similar output in assembly or punch cards.

pjm331• 4 months ago

I've had the same thought recently and this definitely is a thing that you can do - but there are also cases where you get dramatically better results if you put some more effort into your setup.

e.g. spend time creating a skill about how to query production logs

hypercube33• 4 months ago

Understandable - I find skills for odd duck things and a simple set of rules you routinely prune work the best for me. Went from crappy code in niche projects to it nailing things first prompt almost every time now.

ljm• 4 months ago

I heavily advocate for rawdogging AI agents.

All the fancy frameworks are vibe coded, so why could they do better than something you do by yourself?

At most get playwright MCP in so the agent can see the rendered output

pdantix• 4 months ago

at work i've spent some time setting up our claude.md files and curated the .claude directory with relevant tools such as linear, figma, sentry, LSP, browser testing. sensible stuff anyone using these tools would want, it all works pretty well.

my only machine-specific config is overriding haiku usage with sonnet in claude code. i outline what i want in linear, have claude synthesize into a plan and we iterate until we're both happy, then i let it rip. works great.

then one of my juniors goes and loads up things like "superpowers" and all sorts of stuff that's started littering his PRs. i'm just not convinced this ricing of agents materially improves anything.

alexalx666• 4 months ago

Reminds me of the days spent optimizing Jira

kelnos2• 4 months ago

This is what I do; frankly I can't be arsed to take the time to write all these commands and skills and whatnot. I did use /init to get Claude to create a CLAUDE.md file, and I occasionally -- very occasionally -- go through it and correct anything that's no longer valid due to code changes (and then ask Claude to do the same).

But beyond that, I just ask it what I want it to ask, and that's it. I'm not convinced that putting more time into building the "toolbox" will actually give me significant returns on that time.

I do think that some of this (commands, skills, breaking up CLAUDE.md into separate rules files) can be useful, but it's highly context-dependent, and I think YAGNI applies here: don't front-load this work. Only set those up if you run into specific problems or situations where you think doing this work will make Claude work better.

EdwardDiego• 4 months ago

I've put some stuff in my global Claude.md to avoid things like...

* Claude trying to install packages into my Python system interpreter - (always use uv and venvs)

* Claude pushing to main - (don't push to main ever)

* When creating a PR, completely ignoring how to contribute (always read CONTRIBUTING.md when creating a PR)

* Yellow ANSI text in console output - (Color choices must be visible on both dark and light backgrounds)

Because I got sick of repeating myself about the basics.

theshrike795• 4 months ago

Mine has "always run `task build` before claiming a task as done"

For all of my projects task build runs linters, tests and builds the project with as little output as possible on a happy path.

This catches a bunch of "it's a pre-existing issue" stuff from Claude. Sometimes I ask it to run build first, then start implementing just so that it can prove to itself that no, it wasn't a pre-existing issue, you broke something.

nsvd22• 4 months ago

I usually relegate the agent to code, I do the git part/put the patch together. Git is an excellent tool to review the changes granularly and find potential weaknesses.

d4rkp4ttern• 4 months ago

Agree. For what it’s worth, in interviews Cherny (Claude Code creator) and Steinberger (OpenClaw creator) say they keep things simple and use none of the workflow frameworks. The latter even said he doesn’t even use plan mode, but I find that very useful: exiting plan mode starts clean with compressed context.

steveklabnik• 4 months ago

They backed out the “clear context and execute plan” thing recently. It’s a bummer, I thought it was great.

theshrike795• 4 months ago

I consider it more like people installing oh-my-zsh or whatever that brings a TON of features they'll never use, just because some cool tech influencer said it's cool to use it.

The proper way to do this is find a personal pain point, figure out how to fix it, fix it, and then continue.

That's how I built my own system, zero skills, just a git submodule with shared guides how to do stuff the way _I_ like it. I can just refer any agent to read that directory and they'll usually get it on the first go.

sornaensis• 4 months ago

I've been going heavily in the direction of globally configured MCP servers and composite agents with copilot, and just making my own MCP servers in most cases.

Then all I have to do is let the agents actually figure out how to accomplish what I ask of them, with the highly scoped set of tools and sub agents I give them.

I find this works phenomenally, because all the .agent.md file is, is a description of what the tools available are. Nothing more complex, no LARP instructions. Just a straightforward 'here's what you've got'.

And with agents able to delegate to sub agents, the workflow is self-directing.

Working with a specific build system? Vibe code an MCP server for it.

Making a tool of my own? MCP server for dev testing and later use by agents.

On the flipside, I find it very questionable what value skills and reusable prompts give. I would compare it to an architect playing a recording of themselves from weeks ago when talking to their developers. The models encode a lot of knowledge, they just need orientation, not badgering, at this point.

nzoschke3• 4 months ago

I’ve had success with this general approach too.

The best thing I’ve done so far is put GitHub behind an API proxy and reject pushes and pull requests that don’t meet a criteria, plus a descriptive error.

I find it forgets to read or follow skills a lot of the time, but it does always try to route around HTTP 400s when pushing up its work.

arvindrajnaidu• 4 months ago

Is this the best way to do things? If the idea is to simply compose a string to add to the input? Maybe it is.

pedropaulovc• 4 months ago

Shameless plug, if you ever need to parse ~/.claude/projects use claude-code-types [1].

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/claude-code-types

gbrindisi• 4 months ago

are agents/ still relevant after we got skills? I am genuinely confused on why I would need custom system prompts for specific agents, what should I use them for?

rafaelmn• 4 months ago

It's shocking how shitty claude code CLI app is - config is brittle shit (setting up a plugin LSP is searching through GitHub issues and guessing which parameters you messed up), hooks render errors in the app when there are none and the permission harness is barely documented, zero customization options (would you like the agent config come from a different folder than source root ? nope). Going through gihub issues, same issue you hit has been open since beginning of 2025 and ignored - their issues are /dev/null - it's basically a user forum.

Aeroi• 4 months ago

nice writeup. if you have good claude.md, .md files, .skills or mcp cli you want to monetize I built mog.md to let people/agents buy and sell these things.

qiine2• 4 months ago

Reading the "AGENTS.md" files people write, sometimes, feels like reading "README(2).md"

mememememememo5• 4 months ago

echo "Read README.md" > AGENTS.md

bushido• 4 months ago

I keep seeing these posts, and here's the most interesting thing, for me.

I get the best results with the least number of skills and unnecessary configuration in place.

People are spending way too much time over-prescribing these documents, but AI is like a competent but nervous adult. The more you give it, the dumber it gets.

quang1011• 4 months ago

mais pourquoi je dois souscrire pour pouvoir répondre alors que j'ai déjà souscrit à l'autre j'ai l'impression que c'est une autre page du coup

Spixel_• 4 months ago

T'es perdu, chaton ?

TacticalCoder• 4 months ago

That sounds like serious AI slop to me:

"The project-level folder holds team configuration. You commit it to git. Everyone on the team gets the same rules, the same custom commands, the same permission policies."
"Most people either write too much or too little. Here’s what works."

It feels like I've been teleported into a recent LinkedIn feed. Do real people actually already write like AI or is it AI generated?

lukebechtel• 4 months ago

~/.claude/projects is where the real fun is :)

nickphx• 4 months ago

I look forward to the death of this hype machine.

phplovesong• 4 months ago

AI agents like claude is slowly moving to config hell, as we often see in deployment pipelines, project setup etc. This is always a neverending timesink, and because of AI can/will probably need to be altered very frequently.

In the end it will still produce slop you need to review line by line.

The question is: Do you want to write code you know and verified that works, or review code written by AI that is of junior dev quality that is not verified.

einrealist2• 4 months ago

So when Anthropic releases a new model that "breaks compatibility" with some Markdown files, do we call it "refactoring" to find (guess) the required changes to have the desired outcome again? Don't we create brittle specifications to fit a version of a model?

Leynos3• 4 months ago

Use evals

Coming soon, unit, behavioural and regression tests for your prompts and skills :P

stingraycharles2• 4 months ago

How do you use evals when you’re using Claude Code, given that Claude Code also changes their prompts all the time?

You’ll have:

* Claude model version

* Claude Code prompts and tools

* Your own prompts and skills and whatnot

* Your repository’s source code (= the input)

All of those change constantly, it’s not like it’s some kind of SWE benchmark.

brandnewideas2• 4 months ago

What a pointless, useless article. The shitty generated graphics are just the cherry on the cake.

Just read the official Claude documentation:

https://code.claude.com/docs/

imranstrive7• 4 months ago

how can i check this

HostingSift• 4 months ago

Nice writeup! Been experimenting a lot with skills, agents and tools like GSD and honestly the biggest lesson for me has been: keep things short and simple.

Not just CLAUDE.md but everything, the prompts you type in a session, skill descriptions, agent configs, all of it. More instructions does not mean better results. Claude actually performs noticeably better with brief focused input. The moment you start over-specifying things quality drops.

Just my observation from using it daily but it's been consistent enough that I figured it's worth sharing.

Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

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