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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I would want this. Maybe it could work if the chatbot gives me a list of options before each chat, e.g. when I try to debug some ethernet issues:

    Please check below:

    [ ] you are using Ubuntu 18

    [ ] your router is at 192.168.1.1

    [ ] you prefer to use nmcli to configure your network

    [ ] your main ethernet interface is eth1

etc.

Alternatively, it would be nice if I could say:

    Please remember that I prefer to use Emacs while I am on my office computer.

etc.

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This is pretty much exactly how I use it with Chatgpt. I get to ask very sloppy questions now and it already knows what distros and setups I'm using. "I'm having x problem on my laptop" gets me the exact right troubleshooting steps 99% of the time. Can't count the amount of time it's saved me googling or reading man pages for that 1 thing I forgot.

Perplexity and Grok have had something like this for a while where you can make a workspace and write a pre-prompt that is tacked on before your questions so it knows that I use Arch instead of Ubuntu. The nice thing is you can do this for various different workspaces (called different things across different AI providers) and it can refine your needs per workspace.

Claude has this by way of projects, you can set instructions that act as a default starting prompt for any chats in that project. I use it to describe my project tech stack and preferences so I don't need to keep re-hashing it. Overall it has been a really useful feature to maintaining a high signal/noise ratio.

In Github Copilot's web chat it is personal instructions or spaces (Like perplexity), In CoPilot (M365) this is a notebook but nothing in the copilot app. In ChatGPT it is a project, in Mistral you have projects but pre-prompting is achieved by using agents (like custom GPT's).

These memory features seem like they are organic-background project generation for the span of your account. Neat but more of an evolution of summarization and templating.

Thank you, I am just now getting into Claude and Claude Code, it seems I need to learn more about the nuances for Claude Code.

I actually encountered this recently where it installed a new package via npm but I was using pnpm and when it used npm all sorts of things went haywire. It frustrates me to no end that it doesn't verify my environment every time...

I'm using Claude Code in VS Studio btw.

If you used co-pilot Microsoft automatically appends your environment information to the system prompt.

You can see it in denug chat view but you can see it says stuff like the user is on powershell 7 on Windows 11 etc

Your checkboxes just described how Claude "Skills" work.

skills like someone said, or make CLAUDE.md be something like this:

   Run ./CLAUDE_md.sh

Set auto approval for running it in config.

Then in CLAUDE_md.sh:

    cat CLAUDE_main.md
    cat CLAUDE_"$(hostname)".md

    cat CLAUDE_main.md
    echo "bunch of instructions incorporating stuff from environment variables lsbrelease -a, etc."

Latter is a little harder to have lots of markdown formatting with the quote escapes and stuff.

Does Claude have a preference for customizing the system prompt? I did something like this a long time ago for ChatGPT.

(“If not otherwise specified, assume TypeScript.”)

Yes.

claude-code will read from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md so you can have different memory files for different environments.

> you are using Ubuntu 18

Time to upgrade as 18(.04) has been EoL for 2.5+ years!

I'm still running El Capitan: EoL 10 years ago.

Yes, it was only an example ;)

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