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The One File Every Claude Project Should Have

By Nigel Guy · 2 min read

Most people run a Claude project the same way for months: paste in context at the start of every session, half-remember what was decided last time, and re-explain the same background facts over and over because nothing captures them once and holds. The project accumulates history in chat logs, which is exactly where history goes to become unfindable.

The mechanism

1. Start the brief with the things that don't change often — the goal, the constraints, who's involved, what "done" looks like. This is the part worth getting right once.
2. Add a short "current state" section that does change often — what's decided, what's still open, what was tried and dropped. This is the section doing the actual work.
3. Update it, don't rewrite it. When something changes, edit the relevant line rather than regenerating the whole document. A brief that gets rewritten from scratch each time loses the trail of what used to be true and why it changed.
4. Date each update, even briefly. "Decided 12 March: going with option B" is worth more six weeks later than an undated "decided: option B" that you now have to take on faith.
5. Keep a short "explicitly dropped" list alongside the current plan. Recording what you considered and rejected — and why — stops the same dead idea from resurfacing three sessions later as if it were new.
6. Reference the brief at the start of substantial sessions, rather than assuming Claude remembers or re-explaining everything from scratch. Point at the document; don't perform the context every time.

What to skip

Skip trying to make the brief comprehensive — a file that tries to capture everything becomes something nobody rereads, including you. And skip treating it as a deliverable in its own right; its only job is to make the next session faster, not to look thorough.

Guardrails

• This works best in a setup that actually persists a file or project-level context across sessions — check what your current plan and interface support, since capabilities in this area move quickly.
• A living brief is only as good as the discipline behind updating it. If it stops getting updated, it becomes actively misleading faster than having no brief at all, because it looks current when it isn't.
• It's a coordination tool, not a source of truth for anything that needs to be verified independently — treat contested facts and figures in it the same way you'd treat any other unverified claim.

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