Claude Code Best Practices

Anthropic's Claude Code best practices guide argues that the main constraint to manage is Claude's context window, since performance degrades as it fills with conversation, files read, and command output. The guide recommends giving Claude a check it can run, such as a test suite, build exit code, or linter, so it can iterate until the check passes rather than relying on the user to catch mistakes. It also advises keeping CLAUDE.md short, since only broadly applicable rules should be included, and using skills or subagents for situational knowledge.