Partly, but the order matters. The CLAUDE.md constraints only work if you designed the architecture first. They're just how you communicate it to the AI. The mistake I made wasn't writing bad skills files, it was not designing anything at all and expecting the AI to make coherent structural decisions across 30 sessions.
The rewrite is me sitting down with a blank doc and drawing the boxes before any code exists. Then the CLAUDE.md enforces what I already decided. Whether that actually holds up as the project grows, I genuinely don't know yet.
Are you really saving any time at all using AI at all then? If you have to write the architecture for it, write all the rules you want it to follow, check everything it's written, and then reprompt it because it's not how you want it?