Claude Code Best Practices: How to Use CLAUDE.md for Better AI Coding

Most developers are using Claude Code completely wrong. They open a new session, type a prompt like: build dashboard then wonder why the generated code has bad structure, inconsistent naming, weird architecture decisions, or UI patterns that do not match the project. Here’s the thing: Claude Code is powerful, but without context, it still has to guess. And guessing inside a real production codebase creates problems fast. The biggest difference between average AI-assisted development and professional AI-assisted development is not better prompting. It is better context.