CLAUDE.md: set the trajectory

Build-along · ~10 min at your own keyboard

CLAUDE.md is read before message one. It's the heading you set leaving the dock. A one-degree error at departure lands you in the wrong county, and small instructions compound the same way across a long session. For a preparer, this file holds your voice, the services you actually offer, the tools the firm has approved, and the lines you never cross: nothing identifiable goes in, every authority is VERIFY, no figure from memory. Other coding tools read a similar file called AGENTS.md; same idea, different name.

Where these ideas come from: AGENTS.md (AI Hero dictionary). Paraphrased here.

Your starter: CLAUDE.md for a tax practice

Instructions

Make it yours: Write your firm's actual services and the tools it has approved into the brackets, keep only the never-lines a reviewer would hold you to, and cut it to what fits above the fold.

# CLAUDE.md

## WHO I AM
- [What the practice does, e.g. individual and small-business tax, monthly bookkeeping for twenty clients]
- [The tools the firm has approved for client data, by plan, and the ones it has not]

## HOW I WORK A MATTER
- Nothing identifiable goes in. Clients are Taxpayer A and Entity B before a fact pattern reaches this folder.
- Every authority is marked VERIFY until I have opened it. A section number is a claim, not a source.
- A figure appears only with where it came from and the year; otherwise it is a bracket.

## NEVER
- Never fill in a threshold, a rate, a phase-out or a penalty amount. Write [ASK THE CLIENT: the document the figure comes from] or open the instructions.
- Never say a position is supported, a consent is sufficient, or a paste was fine.
- Never draft to the Service or to a client as final. I sign; it drafts.

The coach checks that what you paste back is your own work. The starter pasted back unchanged won't pass.

Do this

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Share what happened

Paste your 5 CLAUDE.md bullets and one line on what the fresh session did differently.