Writing a good CLAUDE.md

December 2, 2025

coding agent
LLMs
software engineering
context engineering

Grid of line charts comparing AI models on instruction-following tasks, showing accuracy versus number of instructions with line color indicating latency; models include GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, LLaMA, DeepSeek, and Qwen variants, with a latency color scale from yellow (low) to purple (high) on the right.

## Creating a good CLAUDE.md file

The following section provides a number of recommendations on how to write a good CLAUDE.md file following context engineering best practices.

Your mileage may vary. Not all of these rules are necessarily optimal for every setup. Like anything else, feel free to break the rules once…you understand when & why it’s okay to break themyou have a good reason to do so

Source: Writing a good CLAUDE.md | HumanLayer Blog

Providing context to coding agents like Claude is an important step in getting the most out of these systems. In Claude, this is the claude.md file, elsewhere it’s an agents.md file, and this article looks at a number of patterns and principles that could be valuable in developing and working with these kinds of files.

## Creating a good CLAUDE.md file

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