How I work with Claude Code day to day

Most developers use Claude as a glorified search engine.

They ask a question. They paste the answer. They ask another question.

It's useful. It's nowhere near how it actually changes your working pace.

Context first

Every project has a CLAUDE.md at its root. This file tells Claude what it needs to know about the project — conventions, critical rules, stack, architecture decisions.

On Pixel-Mart, there's rule F-01:

Any balance change MUST create a transaction within the same mutation, before the store's patch.

This rule isn't re-explained every session. It's in the file. Claude reads it at startup and works consistently with it.

The quality of the CLAUDE.md determines the quality of the sessions. Not the other way around.

What I hand off to Claude

Complex migrations. PR #250 on Pixel-Mart: an automatic audit of seller balances — an accounting formula with edge cases (pending vs. failed payouts, idempotency, demo shops to ignore). This kind of task cuts across several schema files, requires understanding the system's invariants, and produces a migration with dry_run mode. Claude does this well because the context is documented.

Multi-layer features. PR #249: transparency on the affiliate commission rate + admin state changes for orders. Two linked sub-features. Two frontend files plus one Convex mutations file. One session, one PR.

Deep debugging. When a Convex query returns incorrect data — give it the schema, the mutation, the query, the expected output. Let it hunt for the broken invariant.

The Brain as persistent memory

Every significant session automatically generates a note in ~/Brain/_systeme/sessions/.

Format: YYYYMMDD-HHMM-context.md — what was done, decisions made, lessons learned.

It's not a journal. It's a technical source of truth. When I come back to a project after a few days, I start by reading the last session.

The session becomes the input for the next one.

What this doesn't replace

Architectural judgment. When I have to decide whether a flow goes through a mutation or an action, whether a feature belongs in the core or in a separate package — that's me. Claude executes, questions, suggests. The direction is always mine.

Knowledge of business context. It knows Moneroo has no cents in XOF because it's documented in the pattern files. It doesn't "know" it naturally. The knowledge lives in the files, not in the model.

What this changes

The pace. On projects with a good CLAUDE.md and up-to-date documentation, I ship features in one session that would otherwise take a full day.

Commit quality. Every PR has a complete description, documented decisions, context. Not because I love writing documentation — but because it's the condition for the next session to be productive.

A system that feeds on its own documentation.

→ Rule F-01 and how it enabled an automatic balance audit: insight-f01-regle-balance → The complete Second Brain (Obsidian + Claude): coming soon