When your global and project-level CLAUDE.md conflict, Claude picks one silently. Here are the 5 patterns that cause it and a layered ownership model that eliminates them.
When your Claude Code agent starts doing the wrong thing, the first suspect is always your CLAUDE.md.
But there's a conflict most developers miss: your global CLAUDE.md and your project-level CLAUDE.md can actively fight each other — and Claude will silently pick one, or blend both in unpredictable ways.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
~/.claude/CLAUDE.md # global: "always use TypeScript strict mode"
./CLAUDE.md # project: "use loose types for prototyping"
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