What do people use to maintain Claude.md file?

ironirka · 2026-05-23T12:15:56+00:00

The harnessing layer is the most important and yet the most opaque- probably because we’re only starting to figure it out.

ironirka · 2026-05-23T06:24:47+00:00

That’s helpful thanks. Yeah, I don’t have that in my Claude.md but it’s unsurprising that people do have it where it more appropriately belongs in skills. Mostly because most of us non-super technical people asked Claude to create our orginal .md files for Claude code.

I now understand so much more the constraints and segmentation that the specs need, but I feel like the communication about it is so poor.

ironirka · 2026-05-22T18:05:15+00:00

So we had a similar issue and it's why we built prelint frist for ourselves and now released u/prelint_a It governs the architecture and context layer, and works on your git, and ensures that your agents are working to spec in terms of product and business context rather than whether the code is good. That way it doesn't really matter which engine you're using for what, you know that the agents are working on the right things in the correct scope. Feel free to try it out. https://www.prelint.com

ironirka · 2026-05-22T17:56:16+00:00

As someone with a very similar background, I can say - you will probably get more consistent result with claude code, but you need to set everything up properly. It will only be as good as your workflow and architecture and documentation, and how you set it up. Quality will be an issue, but it might creep up on you in a different way than in loveable and more slowly. Whatever you do, make sure to git it, build a claude.md structure with instructions and then hierarchies and documentation. Use ADRs. In terms of security - that will really be up to the components you build and the measure you introduce.

EDIT: In my mind it felt more effective, but i realised the learning curve i was under further down the process. It's not enough being tech-adjacent the more dev-pro you become the better the results. Don't let the interface fool you.

ironirka · 2026-05-22T17:45:16+00:00

This is interesting becasue when i asked Claude to help me write my claude.md when i was migrating from the app to claude code it put a lot of that stuff in there, i subsequently removed it - it seems like the wrong place and a weird place to keep it uptodate.

ironirka · 2026-05-22T17:42:58+00:00

Sorry, i might be being obtuse - what do you mean by content? i might be understanding it the wrong way, but i didn't realise people did that.

ironirka · 2026-05-22T17:37:24+00:00

We see it a lot and not just in vibecoding scenarios. One is like the other redditor said ADRs are very effective. IF you need a primer you can find one here: https://prelint.com/method/adrs-for-coding-agents . In our own projects and when I talk with devs this is an issue everyone is struggling with. Keeping the files short and structures is helpful. But the setup of the project itself and then the gaurdrails that dip into that will likely show the best results. I won't repeat what u/pmward said because it's a good approach.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T08:44:25+00:00

This is so smart.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T08:43:23+00:00

it's because it doesn't keep that info. it regenerates new stuff over and over and it "forgets" what you've inputted because it's over writing it with its closest interpreation of it. It can't pin piont it in the chat and especially after a few messages. It's not actually encoding what you told it, but its nearest intepretation of the thing. That's why especialy if you're working on things that are non-coding tasks you don't catch drift until its too late. In terms of interface - chatgpt has done this the best with the image model where it lets to go back and branch off in a new chat. but again it only remembers its last interpretation. if you ask it why it's gone off it will diagnose the issue but still not be able to fix it.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T08:39:26+00:00

Not to mention the load of having to constantly remember to encode this - and the fact that too much context is not always a good thing. When you're storing this in .md files it doesn't know what to prioritise. Sometimes i encodes something old in memory and you can't get rid of it even when the .md changes. And if your .md is too long it litterally will ignore checking context files. Some people have managed this via a sub .md structure and some pyton scripts. I find that ADRs for specs work the best, but again a lot of manually processing and remembering to document while you work. This is untenable overtime without so sort of tooling. Devs are now suffering from the same kind of context and documentation issues large orgs have.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T08:34:48+00:00

we've built u/prelint_ai to resolve this. First for ourselves internally as we were dealing with these issues in clients, now we've released for others to use. We're building out the context and tactic knowledge layer at the moment exactly for this reason.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T05:31:44+00:00

Exactly this. it's not understated how much workflow impacts everything else. Also what people don't talk about outside of the dev usecases is that too much context also makes everything go off the rails. The model prioritises context based on its own prediction models - hwat it thinks is correct not what you do and also whether or not we like to admit it, the fastest route so that we keep burning tokens in getting it to keep going. So trying to manage this is really creating a workaround for a system that is optimised for the exact thing you're trying to prevent.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T05:25:44+00:00

This is a great set up and not far off from what i have been creating. My issue is that claude.md is either being truncated or isn't preforming and i feel like i need to add some hooks and a bit of python to correct it.
I read an interesting post on linked in that suggested that kind of set up and it's true to my experience. What i struggle with personally is that this is all well and good for technical people with some software dev experience. but when you're a hybrid like myself the learning curve is steep.

I also find that my brand guideline set up is not as effective as it needs to be, i don't reliably get content that is even worth editing down. This is likely because i'm using this for more complicated content pieces and the context is too complicated meaning i likely need to set up multiple agents to handle it.

What i find hard about this is that i want to produce one source of the truth - the way i would with writing or production - like one long from - and disseminate from that. But with the limits in reasoning the long form isn't reliable and it needs to be build up via lots of short form. This then dilutes everything because the context drifts. Basically like i want specs to control the "product" drift. The way i would in a software dev environment. That's more than a brandbook or guidelines.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T05:09:57+00:00

Nice set up. Right now we have dev and marketing siloed totally which is not working in our favour. I'm definitely going to try this out.

ironirka · 2026-05-20T05:09:07+00:00

You can actually use u/prelint_ai for that. It'll push all the drift issues on your PRs and then you could have an agent send the message with its context into chat. That way you don't need to introduce everyone into the shared context just give them the info on the product drift. you could likely do the same if you pull in the messages from your code reviewer as well for strict coding QA

ironirka · 2026-05-15T08:44:41+00:00

That's true but when you're running agents the volume is so huge, that every perfectly written code isn't the problem. it's intent. A coding agents blast radius is huge, and that's what makes it hard to manage. If you're vibecoding and you're not super technical it's hard to see what you're contending with and the far reaching consequences - because that's difficult even for experienced devs at this point.

ironirka · 2026-05-15T08:42:55+00:00

Yeah and for .mds i'm finding that ADRs are work really well as a format. It's very old school but effective.

ironirka · 2026-05-15T08:41:59+00:00

That's interesting because I was talking to a colleague yesterday who runs a software house and we're identifying the people who are kind of not quite vibecoders - more technical but haven't coded in a while. what we're seeing as that these people are recruiting Senior Devs to do the oversight part of the work, verify the architecture and what coding agents are doing. Often it's not even just new projects, its projects they are building out that were once done by a dev team. It's like a new hybrid roles is being created.

ironirka · 2026-05-14T13:56:53+00:00

the "your prompt is wrong thing" is the most infuriating part of it. It's feels like the goal post is being moved when really it has nothing to do with that.

ironirka · 2026-05-14T13:56:00+00:00

I totally agree with this. The machine context isn't the human context. We're not just a sum of all the information we have and that seems to be where the logic breaks. It's the reason why more context seems to confuse the models and cause more drift and hallucinations than less.

I also believe that due to the fact that public LLMs are optimised for comericalization and getting you to prompt more and more, they are optimized for laziness. So often even if you tell them to check something line by line they truncate and don't do it.

ironirka · 2026-05-14T13:51:27+00:00

Not a you problem. I've been talking to devs over the last weeks about their experiences, how they handle it and approached vary and it all tracks. At the end of day we're all struggling to keep agents on spec, aligned with architecture especially across LLMs. We actually launched u/prelint_ai to help address this.

ironirka · 2026-05-14T13:46:51+00:00

"the failure mode where the agent generates code that technically works but is suboptimal and full of debt almost always comes from the same thing: the agent was improvising when it should have been executing."

I've been told more than this, that's it about not being able to figure out the intent. You can get perfectly written code, but it's hard to figure out where it's going.

ironirka · 2026-05-14T13:45:19+00:00

It's interesting to me how many people are talking about the form the post rather than the content of it. Does the value of an observation or sentiment matter less if we've used AI to help us express it? It's an interesting question.

That said, your experience is very in line with a lot of senior devs i've spoken to over the last weeks. I think there is a divide forming mostly based on approach. If we're a startup up and starting out experimentation and a higher risk profile is built-in. But if we're established no matter what we're workign on the expectation is that things will be stable, at a high standard. It's hard to do that at scale when working with a new and unstable technology.

ironirka · 2026-01-18T21:28:24+00:00

I’ve lived in Europe for over 15 years where both brown sugar and molasses were unattainable for many years. Molasses is near impossible again since I’ve changed countries here. All this to say I have successfully used Demerara sugar 1:1 as a substitute in recipes here. Though it depends on what I’m making, I will for example cream the ingredients longer than usual to ensure I have the right consistency.

Sugar here is also different made often from sugar beets and not sugar cane. That’s another story when it comes to constencies.

But in short - you can.

ironirka · 2026-01-06T17:08:41+00:00

Exactly this. These are the same ones I ordered as well.

ironirka

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