Lead · Advanced
"Never do this" written in CLAUDE.md is a hope. Written as a hook, it's an actual guardrail.
Adrian Koch
·
August 15, 2026
An Anthropic blog post published in June 2026 systematically maps out the seven methods for steering Claude's behavior in Claude Code: CLAUDE.md files, rules, skills, subagents, hooks, output styles, and appending the System Prompt. These seven methods look like they overlap in places, but each actually maps to three distinct decision axes: when an instruction loads into context, whether it...