Most of the advice I’ve seen about getting good code out of AI assistants like Claude Code is about writing better prompts. In my experience, that stopped being the main lever a while ago. What matters more is what the model can actually see when it reads your prompt: which files, which conventions, and how much noise is in the way.
People have started calling this context engineering. In this post, I’ll walk through what that means and three habits I’ve picked up, using Claude Code’s CLAUDE.md and subagent files as concrete examples.