alt Hacker NewsDoes anyone have any suggestions on making Claude prefer to use project internal abstractions and utility functions? My C++ project has a lot of them. If I just say something like "for I/O and networking code, check IOUtils.h for helpers" then it often doesn't do that. But mentioning all helper functions and classes in the context also seems like a bad idea. What's the best way? Are the new Skills a solution?
Replies
cannonpalms • yesterday at 7:12 PM
I wonder how well a sentence or two in CLAUDE.md, saying to search the local project for examples of similar use cases or use of internal libraries, would work.
sshh12 • yesterday at 6:34 AM
Hooks can also be useful for this. If it's using the wrong APIs then can hint on write or block on commit with some lint function that checks for this.
Skills seem like the way forward, but Claude still needs to be convinced to activate the skill. If that's not happening reliably, hooks should be able to help.
A sibling comment on hooks mentions some approaches. You could also try leveraging the UserPromptSubmit hook to do some prompt analysis and force relevant skill activation.