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CLAUDE.md as a Living Document

Every time you correct Claude, follow up with: “Update your CLAUDE.md so you don’t make that mistake again.” Claude is eerily good at writing rules for itself. It will add specific, actionable constraints — not vague guidelines. Each correction becomes a permanent guardrail. The habit is simple:
  1. Claude makes a mistake
  2. You correct it
  3. You tell it to update CLAUDE.md
  4. The mistake doesn’t happen again
Keep iterating. The first version of your CLAUDE.md will be rough. After a week of corrections, it becomes surprisingly precise. This is the lightweight, always-on habit that compounds over time.

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The Skill Creation Threshold

If you do something more than once a day, make it a skill or slash command. Examples that should become skills:
  • /techdebt — Scan for duplicated code, dead imports, inconsistent patterns
  • A context-dump skill that syncs relevant info from Slack, Google Drive, or GitHub into a format Claude can consume
  • Analytics agents that write dbt models from plain-language descriptions
  • A deployment checklist skill that runs pre-deploy validations
The threshold is low on purpose. Creating a skill takes minutes. The payoff is every future session where you don’t have to explain the same thing again — and as a skill, the knowledge loads only when relevant instead of burning context budget every session. See the official skills docs for how to create your own.

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Conversation History Mining

Your conversation history lives in ~/.claude/projects/. Every session is stored and searchable. Search across sessions to find patterns: 
# Find all instances where Claude was corrected
grep -r "don't" ~/.claude/projects/ --include="*.json" | head -20

# Find recurring instructions
grep -r "always use" ~/.claude/projects/ --include="*.json" | head -20

# Find failed approaches
grep -r "that didn't work" ~/.claude/projects/ --include="*.json" | head -20
Look for:
  • Instructions that get violated repeatedly — these need hooks, not CLAUDE.md entries
  • Approaches that keep failing — add them as explicit “Don’t do X” rules
  • Patterns that emerge across sessions — candidates for skills

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Periodic CLAUDE.md Review

Use the review-claudemd skill to automate this. It launches parallel Sonnet subagents that analyze your recent conversations and surface:
  • Violations — rules in CLAUDE.md that Claude ignored
  • Missing rules — corrections you made that aren’t captured yet
  • Stale entries — rules that no longer apply to the current codebase
npx skills add ykdojo/claude-code-tips@review-claudemd
Run it weekly, or whenever your CLAUDE.md feels out of sync with how you actually work.

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The Feedback Cycle

The full loop looks like this:
StageWhat happens
CorrectionYou fix a mistake in a session
CLAUDE.md updateThe correction becomes a permanent rule
Fewer correctionsFuture sessions hit the same issue less
Skill creationRepeated patterns become reusable skills
Institutionalized knowledgeThe team benefits, not just you
The goal is moving knowledge out of your head and into context — CLAUDE.md, skills, agents — where it compounds across every session and every engineer. See Context Distribution for how to route knowledge to the right layer so it reaches agents at the right moment.
The fastest way to improve Claude’s performance on your project is not prompt engineering — it’s maintaining your CLAUDE.md. Spend 2 minutes after each session updating it.
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