CLAUDE.md Starter Template

This is the generic version of the CLAUDE.md I actually run, with my paths, org, and integrations stripped out and replaced with placeholders. It’s the file Claude Code loads into every conversation in a project, so what goes in it is a budget decision as much as a style one.

What’s in it

Nine sections, each of which you should feel free to delete:

• Profile and communication — who you are, and the tone rules for work versus messages written on your behalf, including a banned-words list.
• Verification — observe the result rather than asserting it, and label every finding observed or reported.
• Delegation and parallelism — route subagents by judgment required rather than by task name, plus the model-inheritance trap that quietly runs cheap work on your most expensive model.
• Adversarial review — how to get a real critique instead of agreement, and the reframing that stops the review loop running forever.
• Session handoff — an append-only decision log written before the work, not summarized after it.
• Safety — confirm before outward-facing actions, the destructive-command list, and secrets handling.
• Context budget — the read-and-reread discipline, with a note on enforcing it with a hook instead of a request.
• Preferences — the placeholders for your own tooling.
• Maintaining this file — the part almost everyone skips.

The three ideas worth stealing even if you don’t use the file

The file holds the rule; a skill holds the mechanism. If you’re explaining how a tool works in CLAUDE.md, that belongs somewhere loaded on demand. Everything in this file competes for attention with the actual task, every single turn.

Label results observed or reported. A subagent saying “tests pass” and you having watched eight tests pass are different facts. Collapsing them is how a wrong assumption survives three sessions. Making the model say which one it has costs a word.

Delete rules on a schedule. Instructions written to steer an older model can hurt a newer one, because capable models need less direction and a stale guardrail reads as a constraint to satisfy. Open a fresh session, hand it your config, and ask what’s unnecessary. Expect to cut a quarter of it. When a session flails on something simple, suspect the config before the model.

How it fits

The reasoning behind each section, with the specifics I run rather than the placeholders, is in Claude Code best practices. The packaged agents and skills are at /skills, and maven-template is a full working repository built around the same rules.