I’m seeing this more and more, where people build this artificial wall you supposedly need to climb to try agentic coding. That’s not the right way to start at all. You should start with a fresh .claude, empty AGENTS.md, zero skills and MCP and learn to operate the thing first.
Yes, but as soon as you start checking in and sharing access to a project with other developers these things become shared.
Working out how to work on code on your own with agentic support is one thing. Working out how to work on it as a team where each developer is employing agentic tools is a whole different ballgame.
In my own group, agentic coding made sharing and collaboration go out the window because Claude will happily duplicate a bunch of code in a custom framework
In my AGENTS.md I have two lines in almost every single one:
- Under no condition should you use emoji's.
- Before adding a new function, method or class. Scan the project code base, and attached frame works to verify that something else can not be modified to fit the needs.
.claude has become the new dotfiles. And what do people do when they want to start using dotfiles ? they copy other’s dotfiles and same is happening here :)
I agree with most of this, with one important exception: you should have some form of sandboxing in place before running any local AI agent. The easiest way to do that is with .claude/settings.json[0].
This is important no matter how experienced you are, but arguable the most important when you don't know what you're doing.
0: or if you don't want to learn about that, you can use Claude Code Web
The part about permissions with settings.json [0] is laughable. Are we really supposed to list all potential variations of harmful commands? In addition to the `Bash(cat ./.env)`, we would also need to add `Bash(tail .env)`, `Bash(head ./.env)`, `Bash(sed '' ./.env)`, and countless other... while at the same time we allow something like `npm` to run?
I know the deny list is only for automatically denying, but that non-explicitly allowed command will ask for user input confirmation. But still it reminds me of the rationale the author of the Pi harness [1] gave to explain why there is no permission feature built-in in Pi (emphasis mine):
> If you look at the security measures in other coding agents, *they're mostly security theater*. As soon as your agent can write code and run code, it's pretty much game over. [...] If you're uncomfortable with full access, run pi inside a container or use a different tool if you need (faux) guardrails.
As you mentioned, this is a big feature of Claude Code Web (or Codex/Antigravity or whatever equivalent of other companies): they handle the sand-boxing.
I totally agree with you that this not the right way to start. But, in my experience, the more you use the tool the more of a "feel" you get for it, and knowing how all these different pieces work and line up can be quite useful (though certainly not mandatory). It's been immensely frustrating to me how difficult it is to find all this info with all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.
> all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.
Isn't this article just another one in that same drawer?
> What actually belongs in CLAUDE.md - Write: - Import conventions, naming patterns, error handling styles
Then just a few lines below:
> Don’t write: - Anything that belongs in a linter or formatter config
The article overall seems filled with internal inconsistencies, so I'm not sure this article is adding much beyond "This is what an LLM generated after I put the article title with some edits".
with Anthropic already starting to sell "Claude Certified Architect" exams and a "Partner Network Program", I think a lot of this stuff is around building a side industry on top of it unfortunately
Here's a question that I hope is not too off-topic.
Do people find the nano-banana cartoon infographics to be helpful, or distracting? Personally, I'm starting to tire seeing all the little cartoon people and the faux-hand-drawn images.
I haven't come around any AI generated imagery in documents / slides that adds any value. It's more the opposite, they stand out like a sore thumb and often even reduce usability since text cannot be copied. Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI.
Most of the time I find them distracting, and sometimes a huge negative on the article. In this particular article though, they're well done and relevant, and I think they add quite a bit. It's a highly personal opinion kind of thing though for sure.
Some of the others, I don’t feel like added value, but I agree that these are some of the best of a practice that I agreed does not add a ton of value typically
But they had already lost me at all the links, and the fact there's not a red wire through the entire article.
The first thing my eyes skimmed was:
> CLAUDE.md: Claude’s instruction manual
> This is the most important file in the entire system. When you start a Claude Code session, the first thing it reads is CLAUDE.md. It loads it straight into the system prompt and keeps it in mind for the entire conversation.
No it's not. Claude does not read this until it is relevant. And if it does, it's not SOT. So no, it's argumentatively not the most important file.
Maybe. But I kind of view LinkedIn as a social network for people who only by the grace of a couple better decisions are talking about real business and not multilevel marketing schemes… but otherwise use the same themes and terminologies.
Like mostly people who have confused luck and success, or business acumen for religion.
So I wouldn’t use LinkedIn as a positive data point of what’s hot.
I am a victim of AI-documentation-slop at work, and the result is that I've become far more "Tuftian" in my preferences than ever before. In the past, I was a fan of beautiful design and sometimes liked nice colors and ornaments. Now, though, I've a fan of sparse design and relevant data (not information -- lots of information is useless slop). I want content that's useful and actionable, and the majority of the documents many of my peers create using Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT are fluffy broadsheets of irrelevant filler, rarely containing insights and calls-to-action.
The claim that "whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In practice CLAUDE.md is a suggestion, not a contract. Complex tasks and compaction will dilute the use of CLAUDE.md, especially once the context window runs out.
I think this does a great job of explaining the .claude directories in a beginner friendly way. And I don’t necessarily read it as “you have to do all this, before you start”.
It has a few issues with outdated advice (e.g. commands has been merged with skills), but overall I might use share it with co-workers who needs an introduction to the concept.
Completely tangential, but can we please stop putting one million files at the root of the project which have nothing to do with the project? Can we land on a convention like, idk, a `.meta` folder (not the meta company, the actual word), or whatever, in which all of these Claude.md, .swift-version, Code-of-Conduct.md, Codeowners, Contributing.md, .rubocop.yml, .editorconfig, etc. files would go??
If these different agents could agree on a standard location that would be great. The specs are almost the same for .github and Claude but Claude won't even look at the .github location.
There already is, it's ~/.agents and you use symlinks for .claude, and the dir structure is pretty similar and anything you want to reuse across models is pretty standardized, just not formalized.
Is there a completely free coding assistant agent that doesn't require you to give a credit card to use it?
I recently tried IntelliJ for Kotlin development and it wanted me to give a credit card for a 30 day trial. I just want something that scans my repo and I tell it the changes I want and it does it. If possible, it would also run the existing tests to make sure its changes don't break anything.
There are lots! Too many to cover in a single HN comment, and this space is evolving rapidly so I encourage you to look around.
While the coding assistants are pretty much universally free, you still need to connect them to a model. The model tokens generally cost something once you've gone past a certain quota.
I'm not sure if this is still true, but if you have a Google account, Gemini Code Assist had a quite generous "free tier" that I used for a while and found it do be pretty decent.
I wish all model providers would converge on a standard set of files, so I could switch easily from Claude to Codex to Cursor to Opencode depending on the situation
Issue is that both harness and specific model matters a lot in what type of instruction works best, if you were to use Anthrophic's models together with the best way to do prompting with Codex and GPT models, you'd get a lot worse results compared to if you use GPT models with Codex, prompted in the way GPTs react best to them.
I don't think people realize exactly how important the specific prompts are, with the same prompt you'd get wildly different results for different models, and when you're iterating on a prompt (say for some processing), you'd do different changes depending on what model is being used.
Having experimented with soft-linking AGENTS.md into CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md, this lines up well with my experience. I now just let each time maintain it's own files and don't try to combine them. If it's something like my custom "## Agent Instructions" then I just copy-pasta and it's not been hard, and since that section is mostly identical I just treat AGENTS.md as the canonical and copy/paste any changes over to the others.
So that's what "software engineering" has become nowadays ? Some cargo cult basically. Seriously all of this gives red flag. No statements here are provable. It's just like langhchain that was praised and then everyone realized it's absolute dog water. Just like MCP too. The job in 2026 is really sad.
I think I'm finding a pretty good niche for myself honestly. IMO, Software engineering is more so splitting into different professions based on the work is produces.
This sort of "prompt and pray" flow really works for people, as in they can make products and money, however, I do think the people that succeed today also would've reached for no-code tools 5 years ago and seen similar success. It's just faster and more comprehensive now. I think the general theme of the products remains the same though; not un-important or worthless, but it tends to be software that has effects that say INSIDE the realm of software. I feel like there's always been a market for that, as it IS important, it's just not WORTH the time and money to the right people to "engineer" those tools. A lot of SaaS products filled that niche for many years.
While it's not a way I want to work, I am also becoming comfortable with respecting that as a different profession for producing a certain brand of software that does have value, and that I wasn't making before. The intersection of that is opportunity I'm missing out on; no fault to anyone taking it!
The software engineer that writes the air traffic avoidance system for a plane better take their job seriously, understand every change they make, and be able to maintain software indefinitely. People might not care a ton about how their sales tracking software is engineered, but they really care about the engineering of the airplane software.
I think this is mostly right. The primary difference is that with no code you had to change platforms, but the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.
It shouldn’t be, but it’s going to take some catastrophic events to convince people that we have to work to make sure we understand the systems we’re building and keep everything from devolving into vibe coded slop.
> the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.
I guess that's why I see it as a separate profession, as in we have to actually profess a standard for how a professional in our field acts and believes. I think it's OK for it to bifurcate into two different fields, but Software Engineering would need to specifically reject prompt-and-pray on a principled and rational basis.
Sadly yes, that might require real cost to life in order to find out the "why" side of that rational basis. If you meet anyone that went to an engineering school in Québec, ask them about the ceremony they did and the ring they received. [0] It's not like that ceremony fixes anything, but it's a solemn declaration of responsibility which to me at least, sets a contract with society that says "we won't make things that harm you".
The .claude folder structure reminds me of how Terraform organizes state files. Smart move putting conversation history in Json rether than some propiertary format, makes it trivial to grep through old conversations or build custom analysis tools.
>Claude Code users typically treat the .claude folder like a black box. They know it exists. They’ve seen it appear in their project root. But they’ve never opened it, let alone understood what every file inside it does.
I know we are living in a post-engineering world now, but you can't tell me that people don't look at PRs anymore, or their own diffs, at least until/if they decide to .gitignore .claude.
The fuck? What's next, configuring maven and pom.xml? At least XML is unambiguous, well specified, and doesn't randomly refuse to compile 2% of the time..
I’m seeing this more and more, where people build this artificial wall you supposedly need to climb to try agentic coding. That’s not the right way to start at all. You should start with a fresh .claude, empty AGENTS.md, zero skills and MCP and learn to operate the thing first.
Yes, but as soon as you start checking in and sharing access to a project with other developers these things become shared.
Working out how to work on code on your own with agentic support is one thing. Working out how to work on it as a team where each developer is employing agentic tools is a whole different ballgame.
But why is it different? Why does it need to be? I don't write code the same as other devs so why would/should I use AI the same?
Is this a hangover from when the tools were not as good?
In my own group, agentic coding made sharing and collaboration go out the window because Claude will happily duplicate a bunch of code in a custom framework
In my AGENTS.md I have two lines in almost every single one: - Under no condition should you use emoji's. - Before adding a new function, method or class. Scan the project code base, and attached frame works to verify that something else can not be modified to fit the needs.
.claude has become the new dotfiles. And what do people do when they want to start using dotfiles ? they copy other’s dotfiles and same is happening here :)
I agree with most of this, with one important exception: you should have some form of sandboxing in place before running any local AI agent. The easiest way to do that is with .claude/settings.json[0].
This is important no matter how experienced you are, but arguable the most important when you don't know what you're doing.
0: or if you don't want to learn about that, you can use Claude Code Web
The part about permissions with settings.json [0] is laughable. Are we really supposed to list all potential variations of harmful commands? In addition to the `Bash(cat ./.env)`, we would also need to add `Bash(tail .env)`, `Bash(head ./.env)`, `Bash(sed '' ./.env)`, and countless other... while at the same time we allow something like `npm` to run?
I know the deny list is only for automatically denying, but that non-explicitly allowed command will ask for user input confirmation. But still it reminds me of the rationale the author of the Pi harness [1] gave to explain why there is no permission feature built-in in Pi (emphasis mine): > If you look at the security measures in other coding agents, *they're mostly security theater*. As soon as your agent can write code and run code, it's pretty much game over. [...] If you're uncomfortable with full access, run pi inside a container or use a different tool if you need (faux) guardrails.
As you mentioned, this is a big feature of Claude Code Web (or Codex/Antigravity or whatever equivalent of other companies): they handle the sand-boxing.
[0] https://blog.dailydoseofds.com/i/191853914/settingsjson-perm...
[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
The default sandboxing works fine for me. It asks before running any command, and I can whitelist directories for reading and non-compound commands.
Do people really run claude and other clis like this outside a container??
I totally agree with you that this not the right way to start. But, in my experience, the more you use the tool the more of a "feel" you get for it, and knowing how all these different pieces work and line up can be quite useful (though certainly not mandatory). It's been immensely frustrating to me how difficult it is to find all this info with all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.
> all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.
Isn't this article just another one in that same drawer?
> What actually belongs in CLAUDE.md - Write: - Import conventions, naming patterns, error handling styles
Then just a few lines below:
> Don’t write: - Anything that belongs in a linter or formatter config
The article overall seems filled with internal inconsistencies, so I'm not sure this article is adding much beyond "This is what an LLM generated after I put the article title with some edits".
with Anthropic already starting to sell "Claude Certified Architect" exams and a "Partner Network Program", I think a lot of this stuff is around building a side industry on top of it unfortunately
Operate == me send https post and pray for the best
That's the goal, keep spending tokens and claim you are super productive because of it
Here's a question that I hope is not too off-topic.
Do people find the nano-banana cartoon infographics to be helpful, or distracting? Personally, I'm starting to tire seeing all the little cartoon people and the faux-hand-drawn images.
Wouldn't Tufte call this chartjunk?
I haven't come around any AI generated imagery in documents / slides that adds any value. It's more the opposite, they stand out like a sore thumb and often even reduce usability since text cannot be copied. Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI.
> Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI
Feels like generated AI art like this is modern clipart
It may be survivorship bias, you only notice the AI ones that are bad.
Yeah there are almost certainly times when it is gen ai and you just didn’t notice.
When I see AI images, I skip them, and most likely, the entire article. They're a better warning sign than the ones hidden in the text.
Yeah, I’ve been considering this. They’re going to start removing em dashes, which currently is a surefire way to detect AI text.
Let’s say lose those and using emojis as bullet points. It’s going to be a lot harder to detect.
This is equivalent to "do people find PowerPoint to be helpful or distracting." Sometimes yes, mostly no.
In this case, I'd say helpful because I didn't have to read the article at all to understand what was being communicated.
Most of the time I find them distracting, and sometimes a huge negative on the article. In this particular article though, they're well done and relevant, and I think they add quite a bit. It's a highly personal opinion kind of thing though for sure.
The first one is actually quite good.
Some of the others, I don’t feel like added value, but I agree that these are some of the best of a practice that I agreed does not add a ton of value typically
LinkedIn loves these, even if they're broken.
But they had already lost me at all the links, and the fact there's not a red wire through the entire article.
The first thing my eyes skimmed was:
> CLAUDE.md: Claude’s instruction manual
> This is the most important file in the entire system. When you start a Claude Code session, the first thing it reads is CLAUDE.md. It loads it straight into the system prompt and keeps it in mind for the entire conversation.
No it's not. Claude does not read this until it is relevant. And if it does, it's not SOT. So no, it's argumentatively not the most important file.
Maybe. But I kind of view LinkedIn as a social network for people who only by the grace of a couple better decisions are talking about real business and not multilevel marketing schemes… but otherwise use the same themes and terminologies.
Like mostly people who have confused luck and success, or business acumen for religion.
So I wouldn’t use LinkedIn as a positive data point of what’s hot.
It's not necessarily an AI-generated infographics issue, it's that these aren't good infographics. The graphic part is adding minimal value.
I think it's fine. As someone who blogged a lot, the instant visual differentiation among articles offered by the art within is actually valuable.
I am a victim of AI-documentation-slop at work, and the result is that I've become far more "Tuftian" in my preferences than ever before. In the past, I was a fan of beautiful design and sometimes liked nice colors and ornaments. Now, though, I've a fan of sparse design and relevant data (not information -- lots of information is useless slop). I want content that's useful and actionable, and the majority of the documents many of my peers create using Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT are fluffy broadsheets of irrelevant filler, rarely containing insights and calls-to-action.
So yes, it's chartjunk.
My eye has started skipping past them, even though they're often quite useful if you engage with them.
I think the problem is that they're uninformative slop often enough that I've subconsciously determined they aren't worth risking attention time on.
No. It adds nothing so nothing is preferred
The claim that "whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In practice CLAUDE.md is a suggestion, not a contract. Complex tasks and compaction will dilute the use of CLAUDE.md, especially once the context window runs out.
I think this does a great job of explaining the .claude directories in a beginner friendly way. And I don’t necessarily read it as “you have to do all this, before you start”.
It has a few issues with outdated advice (e.g. commands has been merged with skills), but overall I might use share it with co-workers who needs an introduction to the concept.
Completely tangential, but can we please stop putting one million files at the root of the project which have nothing to do with the project? Can we land on a convention like, idk, a `.meta` folder (not the meta company, the actual word), or whatever, in which all of these Claude.md, .swift-version, Code-of-Conduct.md, Codeowners, Contributing.md, .rubocop.yml, .editorconfig, etc. files would go??
I was glad when linux went with the .config standard for most dotfiles.
If these different agents could agree on a standard location that would be great. The specs are almost the same for .github and Claude but Claude won't even look at the .github location.
There already is, it's ~/.agents and you use symlinks for .claude, and the dir structure is pretty similar and anything you want to reuse across models is pretty standardized, just not formalized.
Is there a completely free coding assistant agent that doesn't require you to give a credit card to use it?
I recently tried IntelliJ for Kotlin development and it wanted me to give a credit card for a 30 day trial. I just want something that scans my repo and I tell it the changes I want and it does it. If possible, it would also run the existing tests to make sure its changes don't break anything.
There are lots! Too many to cover in a single HN comment, and this space is evolving rapidly so I encourage you to look around.
While the coding assistants are pretty much universally free, you still need to connect them to a model. The model tokens generally cost something once you've gone past a certain quota.
I'm not sure if this is still true, but if you have a Google account, Gemini Code Assist had a quite generous "free tier" that I used for a while and found it do be pretty decent.
Gemini Code Assist has a free tier.
You log in with your Goggle account.
Qwen code has a free tier
Opencoder is bring your own model.
You get what you pay for so good luck.
I wish all model providers would converge on a standard set of files, so I could switch easily from Claude to Codex to Cursor to Opencode depending on the situation
Issue is that both harness and specific model matters a lot in what type of instruction works best, if you were to use Anthrophic's models together with the best way to do prompting with Codex and GPT models, you'd get a lot worse results compared to if you use GPT models with Codex, prompted in the way GPTs react best to them.
I don't think people realize exactly how important the specific prompts are, with the same prompt you'd get wildly different results for different models, and when you're iterating on a prompt (say for some processing), you'd do different changes depending on what model is being used.
Having experimented with soft-linking AGENTS.md into CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md, this lines up well with my experience. I now just let each time maintain it's own files and don't try to combine them. If it's something like my custom "## Agent Instructions" then I just copy-pasta and it's not been hard, and since that section is mostly identical I just treat AGENTS.md as the canonical and copy/paste any changes over to the others.
Are there any good guides on how to write prompt files tailored to different agents?
Would also be interested in examples of a CLAUDE.md file that works well in Claude, but works poorly with Codex.
And why would they ever let switch?
Interoperability means that people could switch to them as well
So that's what "software engineering" has become nowadays ? Some cargo cult basically. Seriously all of this gives red flag. No statements here are provable. It's just like langhchain that was praised and then everyone realized it's absolute dog water. Just like MCP too. The job in 2026 is really sad.
I think I'm finding a pretty good niche for myself honestly. IMO, Software engineering is more so splitting into different professions based on the work is produces.
This sort of "prompt and pray" flow really works for people, as in they can make products and money, however, I do think the people that succeed today also would've reached for no-code tools 5 years ago and seen similar success. It's just faster and more comprehensive now. I think the general theme of the products remains the same though; not un-important or worthless, but it tends to be software that has effects that say INSIDE the realm of software. I feel like there's always been a market for that, as it IS important, it's just not WORTH the time and money to the right people to "engineer" those tools. A lot of SaaS products filled that niche for many years.
While it's not a way I want to work, I am also becoming comfortable with respecting that as a different profession for producing a certain brand of software that does have value, and that I wasn't making before. The intersection of that is opportunity I'm missing out on; no fault to anyone taking it!
The software engineer that writes the air traffic avoidance system for a plane better take their job seriously, understand every change they make, and be able to maintain software indefinitely. People might not care a ton about how their sales tracking software is engineered, but they really care about the engineering of the airplane software.
I think this is mostly right. The primary difference is that with no code you had to change platforms, but the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.
It shouldn’t be, but it’s going to take some catastrophic events to convince people that we have to work to make sure we understand the systems we’re building and keep everything from devolving into vibe coded slop.
> the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.
I guess that's why I see it as a separate profession, as in we have to actually profess a standard for how a professional in our field acts and believes. I think it's OK for it to bifurcate into two different fields, but Software Engineering would need to specifically reject prompt-and-pray on a principled and rational basis.
Sadly yes, that might require real cost to life in order to find out the "why" side of that rational basis. If you meet anyone that went to an engineering school in Québec, ask them about the ceremony they did and the ring they received. [0] It's not like that ceremony fixes anything, but it's a solemn declaration of responsibility which to me at least, sets a contract with society that says "we won't make things that harm you".
[0] https://ironring.ca/home-en/
> prompt and pray
This is a brilliant reimagining of the old and trusted PnP acronym.
When was it not a cargo cult?
The .claude folder structure reminds me of how Terraform organizes state files. Smart move putting conversation history in Json rether than some propiertary format, makes it trivial to grep through old conversations or build custom analysis tools.
Claude itself will grep through old conversations so it’s handy that Claude understands too
The article starts off really weak:
>Claude Code users typically treat the .claude folder like a black box. They know it exists. They’ve seen it appear in their project root. But they’ve never opened it, let alone understood what every file inside it does.
I know we are living in a post-engineering world now, but you can't tell me that people don't look at PRs anymore, or their own diffs, at least until/if they decide to .gitignore .claude.
You’re assuming most people using Claude code are senior engineers.
And that we're living in a post engineering world.
The fuck? What's next, configuring maven and pom.xml? At least XML is unambiguous, well specified, and doesn't randomly refuse to compile 2% of the time..
> Simply put: whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow.
No.
CLAUDE.md is just prompt text. Compaction rewrites prompt text.
If it matters, enforce it in other ways.
Exactly!
Alchemy.
Why is this AI slop article first on HN?
Tangential: The image with the heading "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder" is nicely made, anyone knows what tool is used for it?
> Most people either write too much or too little. Here’s what works.
> Two folders, not one
Why post AI slop here?
"Thinking" is about to get even harder to do for most grifters with newsletters to sell.
100% AI slop. All the way to "The Key Insight".