Claude Code Configuration & Workflows

CCAR-F · 60 questions

• A new hire on the city apps team misses coding standards that lived only in a senior's user-level CLAUDE.md. What went wrong?
• A permits monorepo needs package-specific standards without duplicating a giant root file. What CLAUDE.md technique helps?
• A transit repo's CLAUDE.md became an unmaintainable monolith covering testing, APIs, and deploy. What should the team do?
• County IT wants every teammate to receive the same Claude coding conventions automatically. Where should shared conventions live?
• A library team's Claude sessions behave inconsistently across days. How can they verify which memory files loaded?
• A school-district SIS app folder needs module-local Claude notes that should not flood the whole monorepo. What scoping fits?
• A water utility engineer has personal editor preferences and the team has mandatory coding standards. How should they be separated?
• A city team wants every clone to get the same /review checklist for pull requests. Where should the command live?
• A verbose codebase-map skill floods the main municipal chat with analysis noise. How should the skill be configured?
• A destructive-migration skill for a civic database must allow file writes but block shell execution. What frontmatter helps?
• A city deploy skill needs the service name, but engineers often invoke it with no arguments. What frontmatter helps?
• A county engineer wants a personal brainstorming skill that teammates should never inherit. Where should it live?
• A housing authority needs on-demand release notes and always-on coding standards. How should those be split?
• An engineer keeps a personal /scratch helper that must not ship in the city repo. What scope is appropriate?
• Terraform conventions for the water utility should load only when editing Terraform files. What configuration fits?
• Test conventions for a parks monorepo must apply to test files scattered across many directories. What path rule helps?
• Why prefer path-scoped .claude/rules/ over always-on subdirectory CLAUDE.md files for niche GIS conventions?
• The permits API package needs conventions that should apply when working under src/api. What should the team create?
• A civic monorepo's test conventions cut across many packages. Why choose path-specific rules over many subdirectory CLAUDE.md files?
• Projection rules for a GIS package should activate only while editing matching geo modules. What does that illustrate?
• A 45-file library migration on the city platform has unclear sequencing risks. What Claude Code mode should come first?
• A one-line null-check bug in a single municipal fee calculator is already well understood. Which approach fits?
• Discovery across a noisy legacy clerk codebase floods the main chat. How can Claude Code isolate that pass?
• A transit microservice split has several valid architecture options still under debate. What should the team start with?
• After the team agrees on a planned SIS migration sequence, what is the sensible next Claude Code step?
• A clear stack-trace hotfix points to one emergency-dispatch file with an obvious fix path. What should the engineer do?
• A multi-integration permits rewrite could waste weeks if the wrong approach is coded first. How does plan mode help?
• A civic data-migration transform keeps drifting until engineers attach two or three concrete input/output pairs. What lesson applies?
• A utility CSV normalizer should improve through failing cases rather than guesswork. What iterative pattern fits?
• Before building a cache for parcel lookups, the team wants Claude to surface invalidation tradeoffs. What pattern helps?
• Date-and-timezone bugs interact in a clerk scheduler, while lint nits are independent. How should issues be batched?
• Null parcel IDs keep escaping a assessor helper despite vague "handle edges" guidance. What should engineers supply?
• A prose-only brief for a housing ETL transform keeps flipping output formats. What is the most effective fix?
• A civic ETL team wants Claude to implement a mapper with strong behavioral coverage. What should they prepare first?
• City CI must run Claude Code without hanging on interactive prompts. Which flag pattern fits?
• City DevOps wants PR review automation to emit machine-parseable inline comments. Which Claude Code CI pattern fits?
• CI-generated tests for the permitting service keep missing fixture conventions. What should the team put in project CLAUDE.md?
• After Claude Code generates a parks-fee patch in CI, how should automated review be run?
• A housing-portal PR keeps getting the same Claude Code review comments on every re-run. What should re-reviews do?
• CI asks Claude Code to generate tests for a transit fare module that already has a suite. What context should be supplied?
• A parks-and-recreation engineering team has a root-level CLAUDE.md with general repository conventions and a service-specific CLAUDE.md inside packages/reservations/ with rules just for that booking service. When Claude Code works inside packages/reservations/, how do these two files combine?
• A permitting engineering team wants a coding rule that applies only to files under services/fee-calculator/ without cluttering the main CLAUDE.md that every contributor reads. What is the appropriate mechanism?
• An emergency-management skill runs a lengthy damage-assessment analysis that produces a lot of intermediate tool output the main conversation doesn't need to see, only the final summary. Which skill configuration keeps that noise out of the main context?
• A housing caseworker wants Claude Code to propose a sequence of file edits to a benefits-calculation script and get explicit sign-off before anything is changed, given the high stakes of miscalculating a resident's subsidy. Which mode fits?
• A water utility runs a nightly Claude Code job in its CI pipeline that reads SCADA export files and writes a summary of anomalous pump-pressure readings. The job runs headless with no operator at a terminal, so any permission prompt would hang the build until it times out. The platform team wants the run to be able to read files and run git diff, and nothing else, without weakening the checked-in settings for engineers who use Claude Code interactively on the same repository. Which approach fits this requirement?
• A county public-health department wraps Claude Code in a small service that summarizes de-identified immunization-clinic notes. The dashboard team wants to show progress in the browser as the run proceeds, so they need machine-readable events emitted incrementally over the life of the run rather than one payload delivered at the end. Which --output-format value produces that behavior?
• A public library system lets branch staff use Claude Code against the catalog-integration repository. Policy states that the production ILS deploy command must never be executed from an assistant session, no matter how the request is phrased or how reasonable the model's justification appears. The architect wants a control that refuses the command outright rather than surfacing a prompt a tired staffer might approve. What should be configured?
• A sanitation department's IT group deploys a managed enterprise policy settings file to every city-issued laptop, denying a set of network commands from Claude Code sessions. A route-optimization developer adds an allow entry for one of those commands to the project .claude/settings.json and another to their personal user settings, then reports that neither one takes effect. What is the correct explanation?
• A code-enforcement office maintains a custom slash command that drafts inspection-notice language and is run dozens of times a day. The team wants that one command to always execute on a specific Claude model, regardless of which model the operator has selected for the surrounding session. Which mechanism expresses this?
• A fire dispatch center has a custom slash command that produces an after-action summary for a single incident. Today the incident number is hard-coded and shift leads copy the file and edit it for each call, which has already caused one summary to be filed against the wrong incident. The architect wants one command definition that accepts the incident number when it is invoked. What should the command use?
• A county IT team keeps a /deploy-check slash command that is supposed to reason about the repository's current state before a release window. Staff report it often describes a branch state that is hours stale, because the command's text only tells the model to consider the working tree. The architect wants the actual git status output present in the prompt at the moment the command runs. What should the command contain?
• A school district's data engineer is asking Claude Code to update a transformation that reads the student-enrollment feed. The engineer's first attempts described the feed's column layout from memory, and the model produced code against fields that no longer exist. The authoritative schema lives in a file in the repository. What is the most reliable way to get that schema into the prompt?
• A city treasurer's office wrote a skill that reconciles daily receipting exports against the bank feed. The skill works correctly when a user invokes it by name, but during ordinary reconciliation conversations the model never reaches for it. Its frontmatter description reads simply Reconciliation helper. What is the most likely cause?
• An emergency-management office is packaging its incident-action-plan drafting procedure as a Claude Code skill so the whole team gets the same workflow. For the harness to discover the skill, where must the SKILL.md file be placed?
• A municipal GIS team's parcel-QA skill has grown to include a full coordinate-reference-system conversion table and the county's twelve-page attribute-domain dictionary. Both are needed occasionally but not on most runs, and the SKILL.md is now unwieldy. What is the recommended structure?
• A procurement office wants a guarantee that every time a solicitation document is written into the repository, a redaction linter runs against it. An analyst added a line to CLAUDE.md reading Always run the redaction linter after writing a solicitation file, and it works most of the time but has been skipped on several long sessions. The compliance lead needs it to be unconditional. What should the architect do?
• An animal-control team runs a one-week Claude Code batch that migrates legacy kennel records. For this batch only, every run must follow a temporary convention: dates are to be emitted in the legacy vendor's format. The team does not want this convention checked into the repository's rule file, where it would confuse developers after the migration ends. What is the appropriate mechanism?
• A permitting modernization effort keeps the intake web application and the fee-calculation service in two separate repositories. An architect working in the intake repository needs Claude Code to read the fee service's source while implementing a new plan-review fee, without moving or copying either repository. What is the appropriate way to do this?
• A 311 resident-services team is loosening permissions so routine sessions stop prompting for read-only git inspection. A developer proposes adding Bash to the allow list. The architect objects and wants the narrowest rule that still removes the prompts for git status. What should be added to the allow list?
• A transit agency's shared build pipeline began failing when Claude Code runs stalled on permission prompts. An engineer's fix was to add --dangerously-skip-permissions to the pipeline command, and the builds now pass. The security architect is reviewing the change. What is the correct assessment?