One morning I pasted four principles into my CLAUDE.md, the global instruction file Claude Code reads at the start of every session. "Think before you code", "simplicity first", that kind of maxim you see fly by on X, credited to Andrej Karpathy. I felt clever for about a day.
Then I watched Claude read the file, nod, and carry on exactly as before. A CLAUDE.md is a suggestion box. The model nods, then does whatever it wants. If I wanted it to code my way, writing it down wasn't going to cut it. I had to enforce it.
What follows is what that frustration turned into: a config in four layers, reinstallable in one command, and a discovery that runs through everything else. The only rigor that counts is the one a model can't grant itself.
Four layers, and only one really changes the behavior
My config has four floors, from softest to hardest.
