Set this up in 20 minutes

Three copy-paste changes that pay off right away. A personal CLAUDE.md, a settings.json with a hard deny on .env, and one skill for your most-repeated task.

What you are about to create

Two personal files apply to every project you open in Claude Code, because they live in your home directory rather than a repo. You write them once. A third file, your first personal skill, saves you from retyping one specific prompt for the rest of your projects.

1. A personal CLAUDE.md

Create ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md with the preferences you would otherwise repeat in every session: your preferred commit style, a note about which package manager you use, how much detail you want in explanations.

# Personal preferences

- Prefer pnpm over npm unless a project already uses something else.
- Keep commit messages under 72 characters on the summary line.
- When unsure between two approaches, ask instead of guessing.

• This file loads at the start of every session, in every project.
• Keep it short. Files over 200 lines dilute how closely Claude follows them. See Memory management for how this file fits alongside Claude's own auto-written notes.

2. A personal settings.json

Create ~/.claude/settings.json with a model default and a hard deny on reading secrets.

{
"$schema": "https://json.schemastore.org/claude-code-settings.json",
"model": "claude-sonnet-5",
"permissions": {
  "deny": ["Read(./.env)", "Read(./.env.*)"]
},
"cleanupPeriodDays": 90
}

• permissions.deny wins over any allow rule in any other settings file, including a project's. This is the one setting worth having everywhere.
• cleanupPeriodDays controls how long session transcripts are kept before Claude Code deletes them.
• The $schema line is optional. It gives your editor autocomplete and catches typos.

3. One personal skill

Pick the single prompt you type most often, a code review checklist, a way you like commits summarized, a specific debugging routine, and turn it into a personal skill.

---
name: my-routine
description: Replace this with what the skill does and when Claude should reach for it.
---
Replace this with the actual steps you keep repeating by hand.

• Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills/, so this one is available in every project, the same as your CLAUDE.md.
• Unlike CLAUDE.md, this costs no context until the task actually matches its description. See Skills for the full reference and a real example.

What you get for this

You stop re-typing the same instructions every session. That is the whole benchmark for this page. Once it is true, move on to Which one should I use? to figure out what belongs in a project's configuration instead of yours.