I’ve been using Claude Code without many rules for a while. It’s certainly not the most efficient or effective way to use it. With its help, I learnt how to create some persistent rules around logging. When we’d finish I had Claude produce this blog post. It’s been reviewed and revised by me. See what you think. The Problem with Tribal Knowledge Most teams have coding guidelines. They live in many places, including wikis, onboarding documents, and the heads of senior engineers who will politely point out in code review that you shouldn't log the request body. The problem is that guidelines only work if they're applied consistently, and consistency requires either constant vigilance or automation. I wanted to find out whether I could move my team's logging rules out of a document and into the tool itself, so that Claude would apply them automatically, every time, without being asked. Two Mechanisms Worth Knowing Claude Code offers two complementary ways to encode behaviour: ...
I always look forward to the AWS Summit. It’s a great opportunity to learn what AWS, and the engineers who use it, are up to, and to catch up with my colleagues. This year, though, turned out to be a bit different. The first year I attended, I skipped the keynote entirely and spent the time in the AWS labs instead. Last year I did go to the keynote, and wished I hadn’t. This year I attempted to do both, but it didn’t really work. I managed just one very simple lab before I had to leave for the keynote. Although I did manage to get to the Red Hat stand early and be the first to get an actual red hat! Although I did have to carry it around all day and all the way back to Norwich that evening. One of the main issues is the size of ExCeL. It’s big. I mean really big. You may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s peanuts to ExCeL. It’s a long way from anywhere to anywhere else. Poor Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references aside, many things, inc...