Ask HN: What do you put in claude.md and what you leave out?

4 bognition 1 6/5/2025, 4:14:14 PM
I'm very curious to see what other people have put into their claude.md memory file, what works well and what does not.

Comments (1)

fazlerocks ยท 10h ago
Been messing around with the different memory files and honestly it's pretty useful once you get the hang of it.

I mostly use:

Project ./claude.md - team stuff like our weird API naming conventions, how we structure components, deployment steps that always trip people up

Local ./claude.local.md - my dev URLs, test accounts, personal shortcuts. Stuff I don't want to commit to the team file

User ~/.claude/claude.md - code style preferences, how I like explanations (brief vs detailed), tools I always use

The recursive thing is neat - it picks up memories from parent folders so you don't have to duplicate everything.

That # shortcut is way faster than editing files manually. Still forget about /memory command half the time tho.

Main thing I learned is being specific helps a lot. 'Use our error handling pattern' vs actually showing the pattern makes a big difference.