Give engineers work that grows them, the freedom to own it, and a reason it matters — and you get their best. The product follows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most people use AI tools reactively. A mental model that changes how you think about what to hand off and what to keep.