ACI-004: The Tool-Practice Gap

Thesis

Anthropic tells you how to use CLAUDE.md. It does not tell you how to keep that file true across months of real work, and no AI coding tool vendor documents the practice around its tool. The distance between "here is how to configure the tool" and "here is how to build a development practice around the tool" is where the value is, and you have to cross it yourself.

Story

At the April 2026 survey, Anthropic's best-practices guidance for Claude Code was well written. It told you to use CLAUDE.md for project rules, to keep instructions concrete and imperative, to use sub-agents for bounded tasks, and to use hooks for guardrails. It was accurate and insufficient.