Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens

I’ll post it here, one minute.

Ok, here you go: https://gist.github.com/shawwn/56d9f2e3f8f662825c977e6e5d0bf...

Installation steps:

- In your project, download https://gist.github.com/shawwn/56d9f2e3f8f662825c977e6e5d0bf... into .claude/commands/handoff.md

- In your project's CLAUDE.md file, put "Read `docs/agents/handoff/*.md` for context."

Usage:

- Whenever you've finished a feature, done a coherent "thing", or otherwise want to document all the stuff that's in your current session, type /handoff. It'll generate a file named e.g. docs/agents/handoff/2026-03-30-001-whatever-you-did.md. It'll ask you if you like the name, and you can say "yes" or "yes, and make sure you go into detail about X" or whatever else you want the handoff to specifically include info about.

- Optionally, type "/rename 2026-03-23-001-whatever-you-did" into claude, followed by "/exit" and then "claude" to re-open a fresh session. (You can resume the previous session with "claude 2026-03-23-001-whatever-you-did". On the other hand, I've never actually needed to resume a previous session, so you could just ignore this step entirely; just /exit then type claude.)

Here's an example so you can see why I like the system. I was working on a little blockchain visualizer. At the end of the session I typed /handoff, and this was the result:

- docs/agents/handoff/2026-03-24-001-brownie-viz-graph-interactivity.md: https://gist.github.com/shawwn/29ed856d020a0131830aec6b3bc29...

The filename convention stuff was just personal preference. You can tell it to store the docs however you want to. I just like date-prefixed names because it gives a nice history of what I've done. https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5a79b929-49ee-461...

Try to do a /handoff before your conversation gets compacted, not after. The whole point is to be a permanent record of key decisions from your session. Claude's compaction theoretically preserves all of these details, so /handoff will still work after a compaction, but it might not be as detailed as it otherwise would have been.

I get where the authors are coming from with these: https://github.com/drona23/claude-token-efficient/blob/main/...

But I'd rather use the "instruction budget" on the task at hand. Some, like the Code Output section, can fit a code review skill.

As with all of these cure-alls, I'm wary. Mostly I'm wary because I anticipate the developer will lose interest in very little time and also because it will just get subsumed into CC at some point if it actually works. It might take longer but changing my workflow every few days for the new thing that's going to reduce MCP usage, replace it, compress it, etc is way too disruptive.

I'm generally happy with the base Claude Code and I think running a near-vanilla setup is the best option currently with how quickly things are moving.

From the file: "Answer is always line 1. Reasoning comes after, never before."

LLMs are autoregressive (filling in the completion of what came before), so you'd better have thinking mode on or the "reasoning" is pure confirmation bias seeded by the answer that gets locked in via the first output tokens.

Seems crazy to me people aren't already including rules to prevent useless language in their system/project lvl CLAUDE.md.

As far as redundancy...it's quite useful according to recent research. Pulled from Gemini 3.1 "two main paradigms: generating redundant reasoning paths (self-consistency) and aggregating outputs from redundant models (ensembling)." Both have fresh papers written about their benefits.