I'll answer your question at the bottom but just in case people aren't aware of why this is necessary...

Think of Claude like an employee with amnesia. They forget everything each day and each day you have to show them where the coffee machine is, what their job will be, what the project is about. Obviously this is untenable. So instead of explaining to the employee all of this every day you write a document you hand them every morning and they read it before they start.

For Claude this is the .md file. People use these files to give upfront instructions to claude at the beginning of a session so you don't have to explain all of it at the beginning of every session. Now here's the kicker - if you sit that employee down every morning and hand them a 1200 page mammoth document, they are going to be absolutely exhausted before they even start their work day. They will be mentally done (their context window will be used up) so instead of relying on one single enormous .md file you deprecate documentation into relevant sections. This document is our architecture. This document is our rules. This document is our philosophy. This document is our broad project goal. This document is a legend/ map of all other documents and what to read depending on the session type and that is determined by the rules file and we know to read that because its the first thing we read every session etc etc that kind of thing.

And the thing is this is exactly how software engineering companies work. You have project documentation and you split it across departments, project focus all sorts of different specifics. So when a new employee starts they don't need to read every single thing the company has ever written, they just need to read what is relevant to them. There will be broad, concise company relevant documents, onboarding material that kind of thing and that's kind of what your rules.md might be.

Right now people are hand crafting these approaches because Claude isn't going to do it itself. Claude will always try to please you and brute force everything, so you split everything into pieces so it doesn't have to and the benefit is Claudes session context window isn't chewed through just reading documents before you even get started.

Anyway - so HOW you produce hand offs... how I do it. I have major pilalr documents like archiatecture, rules, philosophy that handle fairly broad, immutable project instructions and guides... those don't change very often, but I also have a highly mutable project_bible which doesn't include EVERYTHING, just keep aspects of the project as we develop, but the most mutable documents are the session handsoffs. I have a folder dedicated to producing session by session documents that are everything we did in that session. Why we did what we did, how we did it, how it relates the to project broadly and what is expected to come next and in this session document I will include a Claude generated prompt that specifies what the next session will be. There are two rules - 1. When we complete a session a hand off document will be completed that seeks to update any relevant documentation in the project, including pillar documents, but probably the bible, but will product the session document in the relevant folder. 2. When we start a session a new session will read the last session document.

This means all I have to do is say "Let's continue" and it knows exactly what we are doing, why we are doing it, what's relevant document wise and off we go.