Field Notes

Every time you open Claude you make a choice you probably don't notice: how much of the work to hand over. There are three ways to work with AI.

Deciding how much to hand the AI is one move. There are four — and most engineers only practice the first two. Anthropic's 4Ds, in plain engineering terms: SSRR.

Your team is already using AI. They just don't agree on how. SSRR — Scope, Spec, Review, Release — gives engineering leaders a shared vocabulary for it.

Give engineers work that grows them, the freedom to own it, and a reason it matters — and you get their best. The product follows.

Most engineers open the .claude directory once, see CLAUDE.md, and move on. That's the whole mistake. Here's how to set it up properly — for a team, not just yourself.

CLAUDE.md loads at the start of every session. Get it wrong and Claude repeats the same mistakes forever. Here's how Boris Cherny — who built Claude Code — actually writes it.

CLAUDE.local.md never leaves your machine. Here's how to use it as a personal rule file built from the one source of feedback most engineers ignore — their own PR comments.

Most people use AI tools reactively. A mental model that changes how you think about what to hand off and what to keep.