Everything in its place, avant le service.

Walk into a serious kitchen ten minutes before the doors open. Shallots minced. Stock warm. Knives sharpened. Salt within reach. Nobody's doing it once the tickets land — they did it before. The right context, pre-staged.

Today's drop is about the file that does that for a repo — CLAUDE.md.

La Ligne · The Line

Conventions

Commands

Architecture

Gotchas

Feature · Project Memory

CLAUDE.md — the prep that survives the shift change.

Drop a CLAUDE.md at the root of a repo and Claude Code reads it on every session start. It becomes the standing brief for the project: how the codebase is organised, which commands matter, which paths are sacred, which bugs are old friends.

Anything the agent would otherwise have to re-derive by grepping around — naming conventions, the prod database is read-only, run the formatter before commits, the weird thing about how you handle migrations — write it down once.

You can scope it three ways: ./CLAUDE.md for the repo, ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for your personal style, and CLAUDE.local.md for the bits you don't want to commit. Inside any session, # at the start of a line lets you add a note to memory mid-stream.

Mise · en · Place

CLAUDE.md, family meal

A standing brief for the line cook who just walked in.

# Project: orca-api (Go 1.22 + Postgres)

## Commands
- test:   go test ./... -race
- lint:   golangci-lint run
- run:    docker compose up api
- migrate: goose -dir db/migrations postgres "$DSN" up

## Conventions
- handlers return *apperr.Error, never raw error
- no panics outside main; wrap with errors.Wrap
- table names: snake_case, plural

## Gotchas
- prod DB is read-only from this repo
- /internal/auth is owned by platform-sec; PR them first
- migrations must be additive — no DROPs

Eight lines saves eight grep loops.

"Mise en place is the religion of all good line cooks — the universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: your sauces lined up, your knives sharp, your towels clean." — Anthony Bourdain · Kitchen Confidential

Today's pairing Mise en place × CLAUDE.md

Prep time ~15 minutes, once

Yields Every session, faster · forever