Every Annoyance Is a Rule Waiting to Be Written
This is a member-only chapter. Log in with your Signal Over Noise membership email to continue.
Log in to readModule 2 · Section 2 of 7
Every Annoyance Is a Rule Waiting to Be Written
“How you work” means your preferences, patterns, and non-negotiables. The stuff you’d tell a human assistant in their first week:
## How I Work
- Always check what exists before creating something new
- Prefer editing existing files over creating new ones
- Use conventional commits for all git messages
- Never commit without running tests first
- When I say "ship it," I mean deploy to production
- Don't add features I didn't ask forEach line is a rule that prevents a specific failure mode. “Always check what exists before creating something new” stops Claude from writing a utility function when one already exists three files away. “Don’t add features I didn’t ask for” stops the over-engineering that wastes your time.
The best rules come from friction. Every time Claude does something that annoys you, that’s a rule waiting to be written. Over time, your CLAUDE.md becomes a record of every lesson learned — a document that gets more valuable the longer you use it.
Try this: Think about the last three times AI output annoyed you. What happened? Write a rule that would have prevented each one.