For the first few weeks with Claude Code, I used it like an overqualified search engine paste an error, grab the snippet, fix whatever it broke, and repeat. It got the job done, but it felt like pairing with a brilliant junior dev who suffered total amnesia every time I cleared the terminal. After getting fed up with constantly correcting the same package manager slip-ups and component styles, I spent a weekend configuring our repo's context files and hooks so it would actually stop behaving like a complete stranger in the codebase.
Table of Contents
CLAUDE.md: The Baseline
Rules: Hard Guardrails over General Docs
Custom Skills for Repetitive Prompts
