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Writing a good Claude.md

humanlayer.dev

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Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#71

Post by MarkMarine »

Aurornis wrote: post #60
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #49

I don't get the point. Point it at your relevent files ask it to review discuss the update refine it's understanding and then tell it to go. I have found that more context comments and info damage quality on hard problems. I actually for a long time now have two views for my code. 1. The raw code with no empty space or comments. 2. Code with comments I never give the second to my LLM. The more context you give the lo…

> I have found that more context comments and info damage quality on hard problems. There can be diminishing returns, but every time I’ve used Claude Code for a real project I’ve found myself repeating certain things over and over again and interrupting tool usage until I put it in the Claude notes file. You shouldn’t try to put everything in there all the time, but putting key info in there has been very high ROI fo…

Setting hooks has been super helpful for me, you can reject certain uses of tools (don’t touch my tests for this session) with just simple scripting code.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#72

Post by DR_MING »

I already forgot CLAUDE.md, I generate and update it by AI, I prefer to keep design, tasks, docs folder instead. It is always better to ask it to read a some spec docs and read the real code first before doing anything.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#73

Post by alwillis »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #47
gonzalohm wrote: post #21

Probably a lot of people here disagree with this feeling. But my take is that if setting up all the AI infrastructure and onboarding to my code is going to take this amount of effort, then I might as well code the damn thing myself which is what I'm getting paid to (and enjoy doing anyway)

I strongly disagree with the author not using /init. It takes a minute to run and Claude provides surprisingly good results.

/init has evolved since the early day; it's more concise than it used to be.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#74

Post by cruffle_duffle »

teiferer wrote: post #53
0xblacklight wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, post author here :) Yes README.md should still be written for humans and isn’t going away anytime soon. CLAUDE.md is a convention used by claude code, and AGENTS.md is used by other coding agents. Both are intended to be supplemental to the README and are deterministically injected into the agent’s context. It’s a configuration point for the harness, it’s not intended to replace the README. Some of the advice in…

> you shouldn’t use an LLM to do a linter &formatter’s job, Why is that good advice? If that thing is eventually supposed to do the most tricky coding tasks, and already a year ago could have won a medal at the informatics olympics, then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly? Either it's going to change the world, then this is a trivial task, or it's all…

The stateless nature of Claude code is what annoys me so much. Like it has to spend so much time doing repetitious bootstraps. And how much it “picks up and propagates” random shit it finds in some document it wrote. It will echo back something it wrote that “stood out” and I’ll forget where it got that and ask “find where you found that info so we can remove it.” And it will do so but somehow mysteriously pick it up again and it will be because of some git commit message or something. It’s like a tune stuck in its head or something only it’s sticky for LLMs not humans.

And that describes the issues I had with “automatic memories” features things like ChatGPT had. Turns out it is an awful judge of things to remember. Like it would make memories like “cruffle is trying to make pepper soup with chicken stock”! Which it would then parrot back to me at some point 4 months later and I’d be like “WTF I figured it out”. The “# remember this” is much more powerful because know how sticky this stuff gets and id rather have it over index on my own forceful memories than random shit it decided.

I dunno. All I’m saying is you are right. The future is in having these things do a better job of remembering. And I don’t know if LLMs are the right tool for that. Keyword search isn’t either though. And vector search might not be either—I think it suffers from the same kinds of “catchy tune attack” an LLM might.

Somebody will figure it out somehow.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#75

Post by 0xblacklight »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #47
gonzalohm wrote: post #21

Probably a lot of people here disagree with this feeling. But my take is that if setting up all the AI infrastructure and onboarding to my code is going to take this amount of effort, then I might as well code the damn thing myself which is what I'm getting paid to (and enjoy doing anyway)

I strongly disagree with the author not using /init. It takes a minute to run and Claude provides surprisingly good results.

If you find it works for you, then that’s great! This post is mostly from our learnings from getting it to solve hard problems in complex brownfield codebases where auto generation is almost never sufficient.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#76

Post by nichochar »

gonzalohm wrote: post #21

Probably a lot of people here disagree with this feeling. But my take is that if setting up all the AI infrastructure and onboarding to my code is going to take this amount of effort, then I might as well code the damn thing myself which is what I'm getting paid to (and enjoy doing anyway)

The effort described in the article is maybe a couple hours of work.

I understand the "enjoy doing anyway" part and it resonates, but not using AI is simply less productive.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#77

Post by lijok »

grishka wrote: post #64

Oh yeah I added a CLAUDE.md to my project the other day: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen/blob/master/CLAUDE.md Is it a good one?

I copy/pasted it into my codebase to see if it’s any good and now Claude is refusing to do any work? I asked Copilot to investigate why Claude is not working but it too is not working. Do you know what happened?

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#78

Post by lijok »

teiferer wrote: post #53
0xblacklight wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, post author here :) Yes README.md should still be written for humans and isn’t going away anytime soon. CLAUDE.md is a convention used by claude code, and AGENTS.md is used by other coding agents. Both are intended to be supplemental to the README and are deterministically injected into the agent’s context. It’s a configuration point for the harness, it’s not intended to replace the README. Some of the advice in…

> you shouldn’t use an LLM to do a linter &formatter’s job, Why is that good advice? If that thing is eventually supposed to do the most tricky coding tasks, and already a year ago could have won a medal at the informatics olympics, then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly? Either it's going to change the world, then this is a trivial task, or it's all…

> All junior devs I'm working with remember what I told them 2 weeks ago

That’s why they’re junior

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#80

Post by alwillis »

teiferer wrote: post #53
0xblacklight wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, post author here :) Yes README.md should still be written for humans and isn’t going away anytime soon. CLAUDE.md is a convention used by claude code, and AGENTS.md is used by other coding agents. Both are intended to be supplemental to the README and are deterministically injected into the agent’s context. It’s a configuration point for the harness, it’s not intended to replace the README. Some of the advice in…

> you shouldn’t use an LLM to do a linter &formatter’s job, Why is that good advice? If that thing is eventually supposed to do the most tricky coding tasks, and already a year ago could have won a medal at the informatics olympics, then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly? Either it's going to change the world, then this is a trivial task, or it's all…

> Then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly?

It's not that an agent doesn't know if you're using 2 or 4 spaces in your code; it comes down to:

- there are many ways to ensure your code is formatted correctly; that's what .editorconfig [1] is for.

- in a halfway serious project, incorrectly formatted code shouldn't reach the LLM in the first place

- tokens are relatively cheap but they're not free on a paid plan; why spend tokens on something linters and formatters can do deterministically and for free?

If you wanted Claude Code to handle linting automatically, you're better off taking that out of CLAUDE.md and creating a Skill [2].

> What? Why would that be a reasonable assumption/prediction for even near-term agent capabilities? Providing it with some kind of local memory to dump its learned-so-far state of the world shouldn't be too hard. Isn't it supposed to already be treated like a junior dev? All junior devs I'm working with remember what I told them 2 weeks ago. Surely a coding agent can eventually support that too.

It wasn't mentioned in the article, but Claude Code, for example, does save each chat session by default. You can come back to a project and type `claude --resume` and you'll get a list of past Claude Code sessions that you can pick up from where you left off.

[1]: https://editorconfig.org

[2]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills

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