A 5th CLAUDE.md rule: make Claude interview you before coding
u/SpecificPark2594 added a rule to their CLAUDE.md requiring Claude to interview the user, formalize decisions, and persist them in a SPECIFICATIONS.md before writing code — a workflow they call "Maieutics."
Score breakdown
The post describes a concrete CLAUDE.md pattern that shifts responsibility for requirement elicitation onto the agent itself, replacing silent assumption-making with a persisted SPECIFICATIONS.md that keeps human intent and agent behavior aligned throughout a project.
- 01u/SpecificPark2594 built a rigid body simulator in JAX with Claude despite having no prior physics engine knowledge.
- 02The post's core argument: coding agents silently fill underspecified gaps with compounding assumptions, leading to building the wrong thing.
- 03The proposed workflow is called 'Maieutics' — Claude interviews the user, formalizes decisions, and persists them in a SPECIFICATIONS.md file.
u/SpecificPark2594 shares a workflow insight that emerged while building an XPBD (Extended Position-Based Dynamics) rigid body simulator in JAX with Claude — a project they undertook with no prior physics engine knowledge. The post's central argument is that coding agents silently fill underspecified gaps with assumptions, and those assumptions compound until the user has built the wrong thing entirely.
That file then serves as the single source of truth for the project.
The proposed fix is a practice the author calls "Maieutics": a 5th rule added to their `CLAUDE.md` that assigns Claude the responsibility to interview the user before and during development, formalize the clarified decisions, and persist them in a `SPECIFICATIONS.md` file. That file then serves as the single source of truth for the project. As a concrete illustration, when the author described their performance requirements, Claude asked whether they needed high-precision convergence or approximate-but-fast results — a question that led to selecting a Jacobi solver instead of the standard Gauss-Seidel approach, a distinction the author says they would never have identified independently.
The author has published the repo (`spec_driven_xpbd`) and explicitly invites others to copy the `CLAUDE.md` configuration.
Key facts
- 01u/SpecificPark2594 built a rigid body simulator in JAX with Claude despite having no prior physics engine knowledge.
- 02The post's core argument: coding agents silently fill underspecified gaps with compounding assumptions, leading to building the wrong thing.
- 03The proposed workflow is called 'Maieutics' — Claude interviews the user, formalizes decisions, and persists them in a SPECIFICATIONS.md file.
- 04This approach is encoded as a 5th rule added to the author's CLAUDE.md.
- 05SPECIFICATIONS.md becomes the single source of truth for the project.
- 06A concrete example: Claude's clarifying question about convergence precision vs. speed led to choosing a Jacobi solver over the standard Gauss-Seidel solver.
- 07The repo is published as `spec_driven_xpbd` and the CLAUDE.md is available for others to copy.
Topics
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