The File That Turns Claude Code Into Your Best Engineer đ§
A complete guide to CLAUDE.md, rules, skills, subagents, and hooks - everything you need to make Claude Code your 10X Engineer đ
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Boris Cherny built Claude Code at Anthropic. He runs five parallel Claude instances from his terminal, each one capable of one-shotting a full feature implementation. His secret isnât a better model or some internal tool the rest of us donât have access to.
Itâs a folder.
The .claude/ directory is where Claude Codeâs behavior is defined: what it knows about your project, what itâs allowed to do, which rules it follows, which specialists it can delegate to, and what happens automatically at every stage of a session.
Most developers have never opened it. The teams that have - and have configured it deliberately - report the kind of productivity numbers that sound exaggerated until youâve seen the setup.
This guide breaks down every file in that folder, what it does, and how to configure it.
Youâll get Boris Chernyâs actual CLAUDE.md - the behavioral rules he uses daily, written less like a config file and more like an engineering managerâs expectations doc.
Youâll see a production-ready CLAUDE.md for a real B2B SaaS stack with billing, auth, and background jobs.
And youâll walk through the full system - rules, skills, subagents, hooks, permissions, and plugins - with enough detail to set up your own in an afternoon.
By the end, youâll understand why the gap between âClaude Code worksâ and âClaude Code works the way my team needs it toâ is almost entirely a configuration problem. And youâll have everything you need to close it.
To make Claude even more powerful, Iâm also sharing Everything Anthropic Teaches Its Claude Certified Architects (Full Production Guide), how to 10X your Claude Skills (using Karpathyâs autoresearch method), and how I turned Claude Cowork Into My Personal COO that does real work while I sleep. It has everything you need to make AI your most powerful resource & leverage, and automate your work and life đ€