Claude Code is most useful when it is treated as an engineering collaborator rather than a one-shot code generator. The quality of the result depends less on writing a clever prompt and more on giving the agent a disciplined workflow: establish project context, inspect before editing, plan risky changes, isolate research, and verify the outcome.
This is the workflow I use for real codebases.
1. Put durable project context in CLAUDE.md
Every session starts with a limited context window. If your architecture, commands, conventions, and review rules only live in chat messages, you will repeat yourself and eventually get inconsistent results.
A concise CLAUDE.md should answer the questions a new teammate would ask:
