Portland Startup Week: Build the CLAUDE.md Your Project Needs

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Talk by Sam Keen, Portland AI Engineers

If your team uses Claude Code, you've noticed the gap: some sessions produce clean, useful output and others feel like explaining your project from scratch. Again.

The difference isn't the prompt. It's whether Claude has context about your project before anyone starts typing.

In this session, I'll dissect a real production [CLAUDE.md](http://claude.md/) — the file that gives Claude Code persistent project knowledge — section by section. What belongs there, what doesn't, and how each decision changes Claude's behavior. You'll walk out knowing how to set one up for your own codebase.

Why this matters for startup teams:

• You're moving fast and can't afford inconsistent AI output session to session
• Your codebase context changes weekly. Claude needs to keep up without hand-holding
• Onboarding new devs (or AI) to your stack shouldn't require a 30-minute Slack thread every time

Format: 30 minutes, live, interactive. Real files, real terminal, real decisions.

About me: I'm Sam Keen. 25+ years shipping production software (AWS, Nike, Lululemon), author of Clean Architecture with Python (Packt, 2025), co-founder of Portland AI Engineers (1,200+ members). I use Claude Code as my primary dev tool daily. This session teaches the system I actually work in.