You start a project with Claude. A few weeks in you have a file of rules, and every line got there because something went wrong once.

The agent pushed to main. Never commit to main; always work on a branch.

A test reached the live API and moved real data. Tests never call production.

A handler wrote to the database directly. All writes go through the repository.

That file is everything the project has learned, and it's the one part of it nobody ever checks.