Comment by handoflixue

The main failure state I find is that Claude wants to write an incredibly verbose Claude.md, but if I instruct it "one sentence per topic, be concise" it usually does a good job.

That said, a lot of what it can deduce by looking at the code is exactly what you shouldn't include, since it will usually deduce that stuff just by interacting with the code base. Claude doesn't seem good at that.

An example of both overly-verbose and unnecessary:

### 1. Identify the Working Directory

When a user asks you to work on something:

1. *Check which project* they're referring to

2. *Change to that directory* explicitly if needed

3. *Stay in that directory* for file operations

```bash

# Example: Working on ProjectAlpha

cd /home/user/code/ProjectAlpha

```

(The one sentence version is "Each project has a subfolder; use pwd to make sure you're in the right directory", and the ideal version is probably just letting it occasionally spend 60 seconds confused, until it remembers pwd exists)