Two files, one discipline, and a measured 10-13% of my Claude Code budget.
A while back, mid-session with Claude Code, I typed a pushback in the kind of broken English you only produce past midnight:
"are we using full netflix level doc uodsyed as ws go here ?"
What I meant: are we updating documentation at full Netflix-documentary depth as we go, or are we doing the lazy version that just records what changed without why? Claude correctly inferred the Netflix version. From that point forward the documentation standard for every one of my projects was set.
That session became the basis for what I now call paper-trail: a portable ruleset that makes Claude Code (and any other AI coding agent that respects CLAUDE.md) write documentation at documentary depth instead of git-log depth.
