Use CLAUDE.md to Maintain Product Quality When Building with AI
Use CLAUDE.md to Maintain Product Quality When Building with AI
Every time you start a new Claude session, the model knows nothing about your product. It does not know your design principles, your naming conventions, your forbidden patterns, or why you chose approach A over approach B three months ago. Without context, it makes different decisions every time.
The result is quality drift. One session uses camelCase, the next uses snake_case. One creates a modal dialog, the next uses an inline expansion. Each decision is reasonable in isolation but the product becomes inconsistent.
What Goes in CLAUDE.md
A useful CLAUDE.md is not a project overview. It is a specification for how to make decisions. Include:
Design principles - Not vague aspirations like "keep it simple." Specific rules like "never show more than 3 actions in a toolbar" or "all destructive actions require a confirmation step."
Forbidden patterns - Things that seem reasonable but you have decided against. "Do not use alerts for non-critical information." "Never auto-play animations." "No tooltips on mobile-sized screens." Without these, Claude will re-introduce patterns you already rejected.
Naming conventions - How you name files, components, functions, and variables. Include examples. "Components are PascalCase. Files match component names. Hooks start with use-."
Architecture decisions - Why you chose your current approach. "We use server components by default because X. Client components only when Y." This prevents Claude from suggesting alternatives you already considered and rejected.
The Compound Effect
Each individual rule seems minor. But a CLAUDE.md with 50 specific rules produces dramatically more consistent output than one with 5 vague principles. The model follows explicit rules reliably - it just needs them stated clearly.
The investment is maybe two hours to write a thorough CLAUDE.md. After that, every AI coding session starts with the same context. The product stays consistent regardless of which team member is prompting or when the session happens.
Think of it as a style guide that your AI assistant actually reads and follows every single time.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.