Claude.md Entries That Turned My Claude Code Sessions into a Superpower (alirezarezvani.medium.com)

An engineer’s account describes how a simple repository file—CLAUDE.md, an Anthropic feature that acts as a project’s “persistent brain”—dramatically improved their Claude-assisted coding. By authoring 10 targeted CLAUDE.md entries (with concrete prompt examples), they turned chaotic, late-night Node.js debugging into a predictable, four-hour React+Express deploy. The entries codified coding conventions, environment setup, reproducible bug repro steps, debugging heuristics, testing and CI patterns, secure-dependency guidance, and PR-generation templates so Claude could operate consistently across sessions rather than starting from scratch each time. For the AI/ML community this highlights a shift from ephemeral prompt engineering to durable, repo-scoped instruction sets that enable more agentic development workflows. Technically, CLAUDE.md functions like persistent context: it shapes Claude’s code style, test strategy, error triage, and CI actions, improving reproducibility, onboarding, and automation of routine tasks (e.g., writing tests, fixing 500 errors, creating clean PRs). Practical implications include faster iteration cycles and higher code quality, while caveats remain—maintaining the file, avoiding leakage of secrets, and guarding against over-reliance on model outputs or automation errors. Overall, the story showcases how structured, persistent prompts can turn LLMs into dependable coding assistants when combined with careful governance.