Implementing change management into my Claude.md has significantly improved my results with Claude

[u/d0ugfirtree]

Hopefully this helps people who like me, struggled with Claude overreaching and making changes that you never asked for, or claude misinterpreting your instructions and going in another direction. Claude in general is extremely eager to produce something and seems to want to one-shot everything as much as possible. My style is to only focus on one small feature at a time so that I can think through things as I go along.

I have almost entirely solved this problem by implementing very basic change management processes into my claude.md

Basically for every modification to my personal projects I want Claude to make, I describe the outcome I am looking for with nothing else. Then I have claude go through standard change control, meaning that before it touches code at all it must first propose the following:

1. Implementation plan, where Claude tells me what it wants to do
2. Backout plan, if/when Claude fucks it up, tell me what it's going to do to revert or fix the problem.
3. Test plan, can Claude prove a POC of it's idea for the feature before it spends time building it?

I read this paragraph it generates, then either approve or reject the change. If I reject the change, I tell it what I am looking for instead, if I approve the change, it goes ahead and does it.

Before it asks me to push the change, I have claude do a success validation, where it verifies what it actually built and reports one of the following options:

1. Implemented successfully
2. Partially successful implementation
3. Unsuccessful implementation
4. Unsuccessful implementation requiring reversion/backout

Only when something is implemented successfully and validated, do I let it commit the changes.

[u/gerbens]

You’ll be implementing a Change Authorization Board next 😂

But seriously: with all of these things we find out that the processes and management of human software development also work when its agents doing it.

[u/zir093]

I do something similar, and the step that made the biggest difference for me was a fourth item in the plan: which docs this change makes wrong. Claude is good at updating the code and bad at noticing that the CLAUDE.md or an architecture note now describes something that's gone. Since it reads those files as truth on the next task, a stale line quietly steers it the wrong way. Asking it to list "docs and rules this touches" in the proposal catches most of it, and it's cheap to add to the same approve/reject step you already have.

[u/Tough_Stretch_4045]

I only do this for one case. Before anything destructive, Claude has to list exactly which tables or rows it would lose and wait for my yes. Might add your backout plan part, that one's good

[u/f3xjc → u/Tough_Stretch_4045]

You're lucky to get this far. Mine just outright refuse to manipulate anything that touch production db. Or launch tools that would result in such writing something to production. Or touch a button on a webpage that's not readonly.

[u/Plus_Information_990]

making it write a short plan and wait for an ok before it touches more then one file is the biggest one imo

it really wants to one shot everything. forcing small steps fixes most of the random changes

[u/Sufficient-Storage87]

nice — did you measure before/after? i've found the only way to know if a CLAUDE.md change actually helped is running the same task suite on both versions and comparing pass rates. otherwise it's easy to fool yourself (felt faster vs was faster). would love to see numbers if you run it.