Claude Architect · Lesson

Code Gen & Developer Productivity

CLAUDE.md, plan mode, built-in tools and investigation.

Scenario 4: Developer Productivity

This lesson maps to Scenario 4 — Developer Productivity, one of the eight exam scenarios. The architect's job here is to make Claude Code an effective teammate inside a real repository: investigating unfamiliar code, planning changes safely, and persisting team conventions.

Three pillars carry most of the exam weight in this scenario:

CLAUDE.md — durable, shared project memory.
Plan mode — explore and propose before editing.
Built-in tools + incremental investigation — Glob, Grep, Read, Write, Edit, Bash used in a disciplined loop.

Get these decisions right and you'll handle most D3 (Config & Workflows) questions.

The CLAUDE.md Hierarchy

CLAUDE.md is persistent context loaded automatically into every session. There are three scopes, and choosing the right one is a frequent exam decision:

User-level ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md — personal preferences. NOT shared via VCS, so new teammates never see it.
Project-level ./CLAUDE.md or .claude/CLAUDE.md — committed to the repo and shared with the whole team.
Directory-level — scoped to a subtree, loaded when working in that folder.

Rule of thumb: anything every contributor must follow belongs in the project-level file. Putting team conventions only in your user-level file is a classic trap answer.

# Project memory — committed to VCS, shared with the team
# ./CLAUDE.md

## Build
- `yarn build` then run `dist/main.js`

## Conventions
- Use absolute imports from `src/`
- All API errors return structured `{ code, message }`
- Never commit secrets; read from env vars

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