[vunderba]

I'm inclined to agree. I've read through the Skill docs and it looks like something I've been doing all along - though I informally referred to it as the "Table of Contents" approach.

Over time I would systematically create separate specialized docs around certain topics and link them in my CLAUDE.md file but noticeably without using the "@" symbol which to my understanding always causes CLAUDE to ingest the linked files resulting in unnecessarily bloating your prompt context.

So my CLAUDE md file would have a header section like this:

  # Documentation References

  - When adding CSS, refer to: docs/ADDING_CSS.md
  - When adding or incorporating images, refer to: docs/ADDING_IMAGES.md
  - When persisting data for the user, refer to: docs/STORAGE_MANAGER.md
  - When adding logging information, refer to: docs/LOGGER.md

It seems like this is less of a breakthrough and more an iterative improvement towards formalizing this process from a organizational perspective.

[tortilla]

How consistently do you find that Claude Code follows your documentation references? Like you work on a CSS feature and it goes to ADDING_CSS.md? I run into issues where it sometimes skips my imperative instructions.

[vunderba]

It's funny you mention this - for a while I was concerned that CC wasn't fetching the appropriate documentation related to the task at hand (coincidentally this was around Aug/Sept when Claude had some serious degradation issues [1]), so I started adding the following to the beginning of each specialized doc file:

  When this documentation is read, please output "** LOGGING DOCS READ **" to the console.

These days I do find that the TOC approach works pretty well though I'll probably swap them over to Skills to see if the official equivalent works better.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

[braebo]

For me, it’s pretty reliable until a chat grows too long and it drifts too far away from the start where it reviewed the TOC

[mudkipdev]

I just tag all the relevant documentation and reference code at the beginning of the session