Live data from Hacker News

Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

blog.dailydoseofds.com

71–80 of 312 posts

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#71

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.

[deleted]

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#72
post #17

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.

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

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

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#73
post #17

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.

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

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...

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#74

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.

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.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#75

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

And why would they ever let switch?

Interoperability means that people could switch to them as well

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

In my AGENTS.md I have two lines in almost every single one: - Under no condition should you use emoji's. - Before adding a new function, method or class. Scan the project code base, and attached frame works to verify that something else can not be modified to fit the needs.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#80
post #4
post #2

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?

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 keep…

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.
Post reply on HN