This is chapter 2 of my book **Building Autonomous AI Agents with Claude Code* — a field guide to turning Claude Code from a coding assistant into an agent that remembers, verifies its own work, and knows when to stop. Everything below is from a system I actually run every day on one Windows PC.*
1. CLAUDE.md Is a "Contract Read Every Time"
Every time Claude Code starts a session, it injects the global settings (~/.claude/CLAUDE.md) and the project's
CLAUDE.md into the system context. In other words, every sentence written here is a standing instruction that
automatically attaches to every conversation. This property is both the strength and the trap.
