Making Your Organization Legible
Give your knowledge a permanent home. Projects, CLAUDE.md, and your first skill — no code required.
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The hardest, most valuable transition: knowledge gets a permanent home. Projects, CLAUDE.md, and your first skill. Four lessons, about 45 minutes total.
Lessons in this chapter
- Create a Project — Pin your knowledge to a workspace so every conversation inherits it. (~10 min)
- Why Legibility Is Hard — Organizational opacity, CLAUDE.md, and the ladder of formality. (~10 min)
- Write Your First Skill — SKILL.md — structured, portable knowledge Claude loads automatically. (~15 min)
- Make It Shareable — Plugins, credentials, and the new-hire test. (~10 min)
If you take five things from this chapter
1. One Project per domain of work. Behavior goes in project instructions, reference material in project knowledge. New chats inherit both automatically.
2. End sessions by persisting what you learned. "Add that to CLAUDE.md" / "update the project instructions" — one sentence turns a correction into permanent knowledge.
3. A skill's description is its trigger. Write it as "use this when…" with the exact phrases people actually say, or Claude will never load it.
4. Write for the day-one new hire. If they couldn't follow the document without calling you, neither can Claude. Every "they'd have to ask" is a missing line.
5. Never hardcode credentials. Use the cascading lookup (project-local → global config → 1Password) so the same skill works on every machine.