14 ms·

Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

627 points by freedomben 7mo ago

maltyxxx 7mo ago
[flagged]
bagrow 7mo 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 7mo 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_BubbleTime 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    - hbarka 7mo ago
      They’re mistaken. CLAUDE.md is always loaded into context, along with system prompts and memory files. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory “CLAUDE.md files are loaded into the context window at the start of every session”
- push0ret 7mo 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 7mo ago
    It may be survivorship bias, you only notice the AI ones that are bad.
    - spunker540 7mo ago
      Yeah there are almost certainly times when it is gen ai and you just didn’t notice.
    - pona-a 7mo ago
      The problems are not visual but epistemic. If the author didn't specify enough to produce a useful chart, then it's going to be the diagram equivalent of stock images thrown on a finished presentation by a lazy intern. You can't rejection-sample away this kind of systemic fault. The simple truth we're about to realize is there is no free lunch: a tool cannot inject more intent into a piece than its author put in. It might smooth out some blemishes or highlight some alternative choices, but it can't transform the input "make me a video game" into something greater than a statistical mix-mash of the concept. And traditional tools of automation give you a much better, more precise interface for intent than natural language, which allows these vagaries.
  - linux2647 7mo 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
- browningstreet 7mo 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.
- simonw 7mo 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.
- eitally 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- heliumtera 7mo ago
  No. It adds nothing so nothing is preferred
- freedomben 7mo 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_BubbleTime 7mo 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 7mo 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_BubbleTime 7mo 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.
    - slopinthebag 7mo ago
      I don't actually look for em dashes or emojis as indicators, I can tell just from a few paragraphs if the pacing and flow is AI slop.
- btucker 7mo 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.
  - hrmtst93837 7mo ago
    [flagged]
- matsemann 7mo ago
  I never trust them to actually be correct. Aka they're probably worse than useless.
- randusername 7mo 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)
cestivan 7mo ago
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TheRoque 7mo 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.
- graypegg 7mo 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 7mo ago
    > prompt and pray This is a brilliant reimagining of the old and trusted PnP acronym.
  - sarchertech 7mo 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.
manudaro 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Claude itself will grep through old conversations so it’s handy that Claude understands too
  - manudaro 7mo 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 7mo ago
> Most people either write too much or too little. Here’s what works. > Two folders, not one Why post AI slop here?
- rvz 7mo ago
  "Thinking" is about to get even harder to do for most grifters with newsletters to sell.
jwilliams 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Exactly!
- deleted 7mo ago
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- adshotco 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- hbarka 7mo ago
  CLAUDE.md survives compaction.
  - jwilliams 7mo ago
    It's meant to, yes.
BoredPositron 7mo ago
Alchemy.
- einrealist 7mo ago
  "Vibe prompting"
exitb 7mo 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.
- heliumtera 7mo ago
  Operate == me send https post and pray for the best
  - dietr1ch 7mo ago
    That's the goal, keep spending tokens and claim you are super productive because of it
- jameshart 7mo 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 7mo 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
    - mitchell_h 7mo ago
      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.
Synthetic7346 7mo 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-shape 7mo 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.
  - freedomben 7mo 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.
    - NomDePlum 7mo ago
      If you create a CLAUDE.md with contents of @AGENTS.md that works and has the added benefit of allowing Claude specific instructions too, to be added below.
  - dbmikus 7mo 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.
phyzix5761 7mo 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.
- sunir 7mo ago
  Qwen code has a free tier Opencoder is bring your own model. You get what you pay for so good luck.
- bhaak 7mo ago
  Gemini Code Assist has a free tier. You log in with your Goggle account.
- bityard 7mo 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.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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- deleted 7mo ago
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- ontouchstart 7mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533611 It is fun to use.
63stack 7mo 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.
- sunir 7mo ago
  You’re assuming most people using Claude code are senior engineers.
  - politelemon 7mo ago
    And that we're living in a post engineering world.
- fogzen 7mo 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.
  - dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
    It "freed" you. :) That's an interesting way to put it.
deleted 7mo ago
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groby_b 7mo ago
100% AI slop. All the way to "The Key Insight".
grey-area 7mo ago
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rdevilla 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
Tangential: The image with the heading "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder" is nicely made, anyone knows what tool is used for it?
saadn92 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - philbitt 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - chrisweekly 7mo 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 https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery
    - mememememememo 7mo ago
      If true it is adding more weight. It is not infallable.
  - mememememememo 7mo 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 7mo ago
deleted 7mo ago
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PetrBrzyBrzek 7mo ago
Why is this AI slop article first on HN?
BuildItBusk 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  I was glad when linux went with the .config standard for most dotfiles.
  - qiine 7mo ago
    Now if only it would be respected more often!
- Titled86 7mo 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?
deleted 7mo ago
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akalidz 7mo ago
interesting
ohsecurity 7mo ago
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dataviz1000 7mo 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 https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery
- chrisweekly 7mo 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."
- brandnewideas 7mo ago
  I'm in absolute disbelief at the existence of this website. Idiocracy is at an all-time high.
  - dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
    Yes. I think people that think like us are in a major minority, ironically. It's a sinking ship.
giancarlostoro 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Yeah skills get loaded into context which in effect pollutes context.
- jonnycoder 7mo 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 7mo ago
huh neat, somehow completely missed out on the rules/ + path filters as a way to extend CLAUDE.md
psadauskas 7mo ago
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gigapotential 7mo 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 7mo 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_fatal 7mo 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 7mo ago
    They’re the same thing now except that skills can have some frontmatter to allow the agent to execute them automatically.
- esses 7mo 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 7mo 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.
functional_dev 7mo ago
TLDR https://vectree.io/c/anatomy-of-the-claude-folder https://vectree.io/c/anatomy-of-the-claude-folder
mark_l_watson 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Emacs init file bikeshedding comes to mind…
  - wilkystyle 7mo ago
    but now you can build your AI agent toolkit to work on your init file for you
    - dotancohen 7mo ago
      My init.el file went from some 300 lines to under 50 with Claude's assistance. Some of that had to do with updating Emacs, but I really only use Emacs for Org mode so that contribution was minimal.
- obsidianbases1 7mo 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 7mo 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.
jeremie_strand 7mo ago
[flagged]
sornaensis 7mo 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.
- nzoschke 7mo 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.
velcee 7mo ago
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adshotco 7mo ago
[flagged]
arvindrajnaidu 7mo 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.
qcautomation 7mo ago
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midnightdiesel 7mo ago
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pedropaulovc 7mo 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 https://www.npmjs.com/package/claude-code-types
gbrindisi 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
qiine 7mo ago
Reading the "AGENTS.md" files people write, sometimes, feels like reading "README(2).md"
- mememememememo 7mo ago
  echo "Read README.md" > AGENTS.md
ryguz 7mo ago
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bushido 7mo 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 7mo 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_ 7mo ago
  T'es perdu, chaton ?
adshotco 7mo ago
[flagged]
TacticalCoder 7mo 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?
edinetdb 7mo ago
[flagged]
lukebechtel 7mo ago
~/.claude/projects is where the real fun is :)
huflungdung 7mo ago
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Arcede 7mo ago
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HironoOcto 7mo ago
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ali_saify 7mo ago
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g3dar 7mo ago
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pugchat 7mo ago
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nickphx 7mo ago
I look forward to the death of this hype machine.
midnightrun_ai 7mo ago
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orthogonalinfo 7mo ago
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phplovesong 7mo 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.
johnwhitman 7mo ago
[flagged]
hikaru_ai 7mo ago
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einrealist 7mo 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?
- Leynos 7mo ago
  Use evals Coming soon, unit, behavioural and regression tests for your prompts and skills :P
  - stingraycharles 7mo 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.
    - Leynos 7mo ago
      You just said it. If consistency is that important, keep consistent versions of model, harness, prompts, skills, etc., and regression test changes. That way lies madness :)
georaa 7mo ago
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dean0x 7mo ago
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brandnewideas 7mo 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/ https://code.claude.com/docs/
kala169998 7mo ago
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imranstrive7 7mo ago
how can i check this
rsmtjohn 7mo ago
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dmts2026 7mo ago
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Aegis_Labs 7mo ago
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minsung0830 7mo ago
[flagged]
maxbeech 7mo ago
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HostingSift 7mo 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.

627 points by freedomben 7mo ago

[flagged]

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 7mo 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_BubbleTime 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - hbarka 7mo ago
    They’re mistaken. CLAUDE.md is always loaded into context, along with system prompts and memory files. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory “CLAUDE.md files are loaded into the context window at the start of every session”
push0ret 7mo 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 7mo ago
  It may be survivorship bias, you only notice the AI ones that are bad.
  - spunker540 7mo ago
    Yeah there are almost certainly times when it is gen ai and you just didn’t notice.
  - pona-a 7mo ago
    The problems are not visual but epistemic. If the author didn't specify enough to produce a useful chart, then it's going to be the diagram equivalent of stock images thrown on a finished presentation by a lazy intern. You can't rejection-sample away this kind of systemic fault. The simple truth we're about to realize is there is no free lunch: a tool cannot inject more intent into a piece than its author put in. It might smooth out some blemishes or highlight some alternative choices, but it can't transform the input "make me a video game" into something greater than a statistical mix-mash of the concept. And traditional tools of automation give you a much better, more precise interface for intent than natural language, which allows these vagaries.
- linux2647 7mo 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
browningstreet 7mo 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.
simonw 7mo 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.
eitally 7mo 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 7mo 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.
heliumtera 7mo ago
No. It adds nothing so nothing is preferred
freedomben 7mo 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_BubbleTime 7mo 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 7mo 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_BubbleTime 7mo 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.
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    I don't actually look for em dashes or emojis as indicators, I can tell just from a few paragraphs if the pacing and flow is AI slop.
btucker 7mo 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.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
matsemann 7mo ago
I never trust them to actually be correct. Aka they're probably worse than useless.
randusername 7mo 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)

cestivan 7mo ago

[dead]

TheRoque 7mo 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.

graypegg 7mo 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 7mo ago
  > prompt and pray This is a brilliant reimagining of the old and trusted PnP acronym.
- sarchertech 7mo 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.

manudaro 7mo 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 7mo ago
Claude itself will grep through old conversations so it’s handy that Claude understands too
- manudaro 7mo 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 7mo ago

> Most people either write too much or too little. Here’s what works. > Two folders, not one Why post AI slop here?

rvz 7mo ago
"Thinking" is about to get even harder to do for most grifters with newsletters to sell.

jwilliams 7mo 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 7mo ago
Exactly!
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
adshotco 7mo ago
[flagged]
hbarka 7mo ago
CLAUDE.md survives compaction.
- jwilliams 7mo ago
  It's meant to, yes.

BoredPositron 7mo ago

Alchemy.

einrealist 7mo ago
"Vibe prompting"

exitb 7mo 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.

heliumtera 7mo ago
Operate == me send https post and pray for the best
- dietr1ch 7mo ago
  That's the goal, keep spending tokens and claim you are super productive because of it
jameshart 7mo 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 7mo 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
  - mitchell_h 7mo ago
    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.

Synthetic7346 7mo 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-shape 7mo 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.
- freedomben 7mo 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.
  - NomDePlum 7mo ago
    If you create a CLAUDE.md with contents of @AGENTS.md that works and has the added benefit of allowing Claude specific instructions too, to be added below.
- dbmikus 7mo 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.

phyzix5761 7mo 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.

sunir 7mo ago
Qwen code has a free tier Opencoder is bring your own model. You get what you pay for so good luck.
bhaak 7mo ago
Gemini Code Assist has a free tier. You log in with your Goggle account.
bityard 7mo 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.
- deleted 7mo ago
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ontouchstart 7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533611 It is fun to use.

63stack 7mo 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.

sunir 7mo ago
You’re assuming most people using Claude code are senior engineers.
- politelemon 7mo ago
  And that we're living in a post engineering world.
fogzen 7mo 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.
- dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
  It "freed" you. :) That's an interesting way to put it.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

groby_b 7mo ago

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

grey-area 7mo ago

[dead]

rdevilla 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago

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

saadn92 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- philbitt 7mo ago
  [dead]
- chrisweekly 7mo 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 https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery
  - mememememememo 7mo ago
    If true it is adding more weight. It is not infallable.
- mememememememo 7mo 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 7mo ago

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

PetrBrzyBrzek 7mo ago

Why is this AI slop article first on HN?

BuildItBusk 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
I was glad when linux went with the .config standard for most dotfiles.
- qiine 7mo ago
  Now if only it would be respected more often!
Titled86 7mo 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?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

akalidz 7mo ago

interesting

ohsecurity 7mo ago

[dead]

dataviz1000 7mo 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 https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery

chrisweekly 7mo 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."
brandnewideas 7mo ago
I'm in absolute disbelief at the existence of this website. Idiocracy is at an all-time high.
- dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
  Yes. I think people that think like us are in a major minority, ironically. It's a sinking ship.

giancarlostoro 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
Yeah skills get loaded into context which in effect pollutes context.
jonnycoder 7mo 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 7mo ago

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

psadauskas 7mo ago

[dead]

gigapotential 7mo 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 7mo 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_fatal 7mo 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 7mo ago
  They’re the same thing now except that skills can have some frontmatter to allow the agent to execute them automatically.
esses 7mo 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 7mo 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.

functional_dev 7mo ago

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

mark_l_watson 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
Emacs init file bikeshedding comes to mind…
- wilkystyle 7mo ago
  but now you can build your AI agent toolkit to work on your init file for you
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    My init.el file went from some 300 lines to under 50 with Claude's assistance. Some of that had to do with updating Emacs, but I really only use Emacs for Org mode so that contribution was minimal.
obsidianbases1 7mo 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 7mo 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.

jeremie_strand 7mo ago

[flagged]

sornaensis 7mo 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.

nzoschke 7mo 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.

velcee 7mo ago

[dead]

adshotco 7mo ago

[flagged]

arvindrajnaidu 7mo 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.

qcautomation 7mo ago

[dead]

midnightdiesel 7mo ago

[dead]

pedropaulovc 7mo 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 https://www.npmjs.com/package/claude-code-types

gbrindisi 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.

qiine 7mo ago

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

mememememememo 7mo ago
echo "Read README.md" > AGENTS.md

ryguz 7mo ago

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bushido 7mo 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 7mo 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_ 7mo ago
T'es perdu, chaton ?

adshotco 7mo ago

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TacticalCoder 7mo 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?

edinetdb 7mo ago

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lukebechtel 7mo ago

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

huflungdung 7mo ago

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Arcede 7mo ago

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HironoOcto 7mo ago

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ali_saify 7mo ago

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g3dar 7mo ago

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pugchat 7mo ago

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nickphx 7mo ago

I look forward to the death of this hype machine.

midnightrun_ai 7mo ago

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orthogonalinfo 7mo ago

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phplovesong 7mo 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.

johnwhitman 7mo ago

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hikaru_ai 7mo ago

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einrealist 7mo 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?

Leynos 7mo ago
Use evals Coming soon, unit, behavioural and regression tests for your prompts and skills :P
- stingraycharles 7mo 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.
  - Leynos 7mo ago
    You just said it. If consistency is that important, keep consistent versions of model, harness, prompts, skills, etc., and regression test changes. That way lies madness :)

georaa 7mo ago

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dean0x 7mo ago

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brandnewideas 7mo 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/ https://code.claude.com/docs/

kala169998 7mo ago

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imranstrive7 7mo ago

how can i check this

rsmtjohn 7mo ago

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dmts2026 7mo ago

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Aegis_Labs 7mo ago

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minsung0830 7mo ago

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maxbeech 7mo ago

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HostingSift 7mo 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.