So far the recipe planner has been a one-person project. As soon as other people join in, a question becomes important that only came up in passing in earlier chapters: how do you make sure Claude Code arrives at similarly fitting results for everyone on the team - not just for one single person who has all the rules memorised?

CLAUDE.md belongs in the repository

The good news: the CLAUDE.md from chapter 10 is a perfectly normal file in the project folder, and is therefore automatically versioned and shared along with the rest of the code through git from chapter 24. If a colleague checks out the repository and starts Claude Code there, the same rules automatically apply - tech stack, conventions, testing requirements, everything stated in the recipe planner's CLAUDE.md.

What belongs in a team-shared CLAUDE.md

• Objective facts about the project: tech stack, folder structure, how to run tests.
• Jointly agreed conventions: naming schemes, commit message format, preferred patterns.
• Deliberate team decisions, like the category restriction from chapter 18, so they don't get re-litigated repeatedly.

What doesn't belong there are purely personal preferences of individual people ("I always want to be addressed in German") - as shown in chapter 23, the user-wide, personal configuration is the right place for that, not the shared project file.

Consistency across the team

A well-maintained, up-to-date CLAUDE.md ensures Claude Code starts from the same assumptions for everyone on the team - regardless of who is asking. That prevents one particular kind of inconsistency: someone accidentally suggesting a database, even though the team deliberately chose a simple JSON file, just because that decision was never written down anywhere.

Keeping CLAUDE.md up to date

Just like normal code, a CLAUDE.md can go stale if it isn't updated after an important change. A simple, effective pattern: after a larger, team-relevant decision, directly ask whether CLAUDE.md should be updated - similar to the memory example from chapter 23.

> We just agreed as a team that every new route in server.js needs its own test in tests/ before it gets merged. Please add that to CLAUDE.md.

That wraps up block 5: context window, memory, and teamwork. The final block of this series covers pro tips on cost, common beginner mistakes - and a summary of the entire series.