The Claude Code config files I actually use in Python projects (CLAUDE.md, hooks, slash commands)

Most Claude Code advice is about prompting. I've found the leverage is somewhere else: the config layer. The files that tell Claude Code how to behave before you ask it to do anything. After six months of daily Claude Code use across Python API projects, data pipelines, and agent builds, here are the config files I actually use — and what each one does. The CLAUDE.md problem A blank CLAUDE.md is worse than no CLAUDE.md. I tried the "just dump your stack into it" approach first. Claude Code read