DEPTH · CLAUDE · 05 OF 05

When you're a few builds in

Three habits that change how this feels

8 min read·5 of 5 in the Claude track

You've made a few things now, and they worked. But you've probably noticed two annoyances. Every session starts from nothing — you re-explain who you are, how you like things, what you're working on. And in a long session, the answers slowly get worse.

Three habits fix most of that. None of them need anything you don't already have, and each one works on its own. Take whichever sounds like your problem.

HABIT 01 · THE ONE THAT SAVES THE MOST TIME

Write down how you work

Make a plain text file called CLAUDE.md in your project folder. Write, in ordinary English, how you want to be worked with. Claude reads it at the start of every session in that folder, forever. You never explain it again.

This is the single highest-return thing on this page, and it takes about four minutes. Most people discover it months late and wish they'd found it sooner.

Write yours in four minutes

Don't overthink it. Three or four lines beats an empty file, and you can add to it whenever something annoys you. Paste one of these into Claude and let it write the first draft with you.

Start from scratch

Help me write a CLAUDE.md for this project. Ask me a few questions about what I'm building, who it's for, and how I like to be communicated with — then write the file. Keep it short and in plain English.

Start from what already annoys you

Here's what keeps going wrong when I work with you: [DESCRIBE THE ANNOYANCE — e.g. you explain too much, you change things I didn't ask you to change, you agree with me too easily]. Turn that into a few lines I can put in a CLAUDE.md file so it stops happening.
A useful habit: when something irritates you mid-session, don't just correct it — add a line to CLAUDE.md. That's the difference between fixing it once and fixing it forever.

HABIT 02 · COUNTERINTUITIVE

Start fresh more often than feels natural

It feels efficient to keep one long conversation going. It isn't. As a session fills up, Claude is re-reading more and more of your history on every single reply — which makes answers slower, more expensive, and noticeably worse at following instructions.

The fix is a habit, not a setting: when you move to a genuinely different task, start a new session. In Claude Code you type /clear. In the app you open a new chat.

The signal to watch for is Claude forgetting something you said earlier, or drifting back to an approach you already rejected. That's not it being stupid. That's the session being full.

  • Finished a task and starting an unrelated one — start fresh.
  • Corrected the same misunderstanding twice — start fresh, and say the thing properly in your first message.
  • Still deep in one problem — stay put. Continuity is the point of a session; the habit is about task boundaries, not a timer.
This pairs with habit 01. Starting fresh is cheap precisely because CLAUDE.md means you're not throwing away the context that mattered — only the clutter.

HABIT 03 · THE NERVOUS PERSON'S FRIEND

Ask for the plan before the work

Before Claude changes anything, ask it what it intends to do. Read that. Then say go, or push back.

This sounds like an extra step and behaves like a shortcut. Arguing with a five-line plan costs you thirty seconds. Unpicking twenty files of work that went the wrong direction costs you an evening.

It also gives you something to disagree with while the disagreement is still cheap — which is the whole skill, and the same loop you already learned: describe, look, say what's off.

Two phrasings that work

You don't need a special mode for this — asking plainly works in any tool. If you're in Claude Code, pressing Shift+Tab switches to a plan-first mode that does it for you.

Before anything big

Before you change anything, tell me your plan: what files you'll touch, what you'll do to each, and anything you're unsure about. Wait for me to say go.

When you suspect it has misunderstood

Say back what you think I'm asking for, in your own words, before you start. If any part of it is ambiguous, ask me instead of guessing.

A SPECIMEN — NOT A PLAN

What this looks like further down the road

This last section is not a next step, and nothing here is recommended. It's one person's setup after years of daily use, included only so you can see where the road goes. If you build any of it before you personally feel the problem it solves, you'll have built a machine you don't need and now have to maintain.

Every habit above is something you can adopt this afternoon. Past that point, people who use these tools all day start building machinery — and the machinery gets specific to them very fast. It stops being advice and starts being a workshop that fits one pair of hands.

For the curious, here's roughly what that looks like at the far end:

  • Saved routines — instructions you use often, written once and invoked by name, so a whole workflow starts with one word instead of a paragraph.
  • Automatic checks — rules that fire on their own, running the tests after an edit or refusing a change that breaks a house style, without anyone remembering to ask.
  • Connections to other tools — Claude reading from a calendar, a database, or a design file directly, rather than being told what's in them.
  • Several Claudes at once — splitting a large job across parallel sessions that each own one piece, with one coordinating.

That setup took years and a lot of wasted effort to arrive at, most of it in the form of things built too early and later deleted. It exists because of specific problems that showed up repeatedly in one person's actual work — not because a list like this said to build it.

The honest version of the advice is dull: use the three habits above until something genuinely irritates you for the third time. That irritation is the only reliable signal for what to build next. Everything on this list started as one.