Boris Cherny's personal CLAUDE.md — plan-first, self-improving rules

A staff engineer at Anthropic just shared his personal cloud.md file. Here's what's in it and why it actually works. Boris Churny is a staff engineer at Anthropic. He shared his cloud.md file. The rules cloud code follows automatically every single session. Here's what makes it different. Rule 1. Plan mode first. Before touching any code, write the plan. If something goes wrong mid-task, stop and replant it. Never push through. Rule 2. Subagents for hard problems. Offload complex work and keep the main context clean. Throw more compute at it. Rule 3. Self-improvement loop. Processing goes into tasks for slash lessons.md as a rule. Next session reads it and applies it. This drops a mistake rate over time. Rule 4. Prove that it works. Never mark a task as complete without running tests and checking logs. Ask yourself, would a staff engineer approve this? Rule 5. Autonomous bug fixing. When given a bug, just fix it. No hand-holding. Go to the logs, find the root cause, and solve it. Most people treat cloud.md as notes. Boris treats it as a contract. Comment Boris and I'll send you his full file.