ME:: tl;dr-ing find a good CLAUDE.md for your type of program and then create a personal ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for your own coding style Nolan Lawson:: How I use AI agents to write code ¦ Read the Tea Leaves

Discovered: Jan 24, 2026 23:14 (UTC) ME:: tl;dr-ing find a good CLAUDE.md for your type of program and then create a personal ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for your own coding style Nolan Lawson:: How I use AI agents to write code ¦ Read the Tea Leaves

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Nolan Lawson:: How I use AI agents to write code ¦ Read the Tea Leaves

I use Claude Code. Mostly because I’m too lazy to explore all the other options. I have colleagues who swear by Gemini or Codex or open-source tools or whatever, but for me Claude is good enough.

First off, you need a good CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md). Preferably one for the project you’re working in (the lay of the land, overall project architecture, gotchas, etc.) and one for yourself (your local environment and coding quirks).

This seems like a skippable step, but it really isn’t. Think about your first few months at a new job – you don’t know anything about how the code works, you don’t know the overall vision or design, so you’re just fumbling around the code and breaking things left and right. Ideally you need someone from the old guard, who really knows the codebase’s dirty little secrets, to write a good CLAUDE.md that explains the overall structure, which parts are stable, which parts are still under development, which parts have dragons, etc. Otherwise the LLM is just coming in fresh to the project every time and it’s going to wreak havoc.

As for your own personal CLAUDE.md (i.e. in ~/.claude), this should just be for your own coding quirks. For example, I like the variable name _ in map() or filter() functions. It’s like my calling card; I just can’t do without it.