One morning I pasted four principles into my CLAUDE.md, the global instruction file Claude Code reads at the start of every session. "Think before you code", "simplicity first", that kind of maxim you see fly by on X, credited to Andrej Karpathy. I felt clever for about a day.
Then I watched Claude read the file, nod, and carry on exactly as before. A CLAUDE.md is a suggestion box. The model nods, then does whatever it wants. If I wanted it to code my way, writing it down wasn't going to cut it. I had to enforce it.
What follows is what that frustration turned into: a config in four layers, reinstallable in one command, and a discovery that runs through everything else. The only rigor that counts is the one a model can't grant itself.
Four layers, and only one really changes the behavior
My config has four floors, from softest to hardest.
The brain is CLAUDE.md: how I work, not the docs for my code. The rule that sums it up lives inside it: "what not to add: anything Claude rediscovers by reading the code." It holds my design principles, my stance on orchestrating subagents (I size up, I delegate, I verify: "I stay the brain, they're the hands"), and one line that becomes the thread running through the whole thing.
The references: a go-best-practices.md file the brain points to in plain text whenever Go is involved.
The skills: ten of them. A skill is a folder with a playbook that Claude loads on demand for a specific job: review code, write an article, distill a book. Mine are packaged as a sits at zero stars. And its guardrails are stricter than the average of the one with 222,793. The lesson isn't bitter, it's useful: stars measure a well-told story, not rigor. The two have almost nothing to do with each other.
The check an LLM can't grant itself
Before publishing, I had my own skills audited. The verdict: the scientific references were 98% real, but four falsely precise numbers and one misattributed quote had slipped into the batch. Fixed. Even an author who thinks he's rigorous can't certify himself alone.
This article is the final proof. I had one of the ten skills write it, from the public repo, on the strength of a brief I'd written myself. That brief claimed "Everything Claude Code" was a lone outlier, five times bigger than everything else. The check against the GitHub API, right before writing, showed there's actually a whole pack of six-figure repos. My own brief was wrong, and only a call to an external source caught it.
That's the whole point. The model doesn't know it's wrong. Neither do I, half the time. The only thing that knows is the test that goes red, the DOI that resolves, the file:line you can open. A Claude Code config worth having isn't a list of good intentions. It's the place where proof stops being a claim.
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