Comment by philbo

I think this and other recent posts here hugely overcomplicate matters. I notice none of them provides an A/B test for each item of complexity they introduce, there's just a handwavy "this has proved to work over time".

I've found that a single CLAUDE.md does really well at guiding it how I want it to behave. For me that's making it take small steps and stop to ask me questions frequently, so it's more like we're pairing than I'm sending it off solo to work on a task. I'm sure that's not to everyone's taste but it works for me (and I say this as someone who was an agent-sceptic until quite recently).

Fwiw my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is 2.2K / 49 lines.