Help the Agent to Feel
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Yegor Bugayenko shares his approach to training Claude Code to match his personal code aesthetics. He no longer writes code by hand, relying entirely on Claude Code since Opus 4.7, but finds the AI lacks aesthetic sensibility. His solution combines a CLAUDE.md manifesto (the 'carrot') that articulates his code beauty principles — preferring aesthetics over functionality, avoiding NULL references, mutable state, inheritance, and comments — with custom style checkers (the 'stick') like an extended Qulice for Java and a Rubocop extension for Ruby. These checkers, which he was finally able to build with Claude's help, enforce the formalizable parts of his taste, while the manifesto handles the rest. The combination trains Claude to 'feel' his aesthetic preferences in a way he finds impossible to achieve with human developers.
