Context Engineering for Claude Code
Structured Decisions — Beyond CLAUDE.md
CLAUDE.md is a flat text file. AXME Code decisions have enforcement levels, deduplication, and automatic extraction. Your agent respects what was decided.
Why CLAUDE.md alone fails
CLAUDE.md works when it's small. Real projects outgrow it fast.
Grows to 200+ lines
Every new rule gets appended. After a few months you have a wall of text. No structure, no categories, no way to find what matters.
No enforcement levels
"Use Zod for validation" and "prefer tabs over spaces" have the same weight. Which one must the agent follow? Which one is a suggestion? CLAUDE.md doesn't say.
Claude ignores 80%
At 200+ lines, the agent treats CLAUDE.md as background noise. Critical rules get buried. The agent follows what it sees first and ignores the rest.
Contradictions pile up
Line 12 says "use REST." Line 87 says "use GraphQL." Both were right at the time. Nobody cleaned up. Now the agent picks whichever it sees first.
How AXME decisions work
Each decision is a structured file with metadata, enforcement level, and context. Not a line in a text file.
Structured files
Each decision is a file: D-001-all-deploys-via-ci-cd.md. Title, date, enforcement level, rationale, context -- all in one place.
Enforcement levels
Each decision has an enforcement level: required (must follow) or advisory (should follow). The agent knows which rules are non-negotiable.
Auto-extracted
At setup, decisions are extracted from your code, configs, and CLAUDE.md. During work, new decisions are saved by the agent when architectural choices are made.
Example decision
This is what a real AXME Code decision looks like. Structured, enforceable, discoverable.
# File: .axme-code/decisions/D-014-all-deploys-via-ci-cd.md
---
title: All deploys via CI/CD only
enforce: required
date: 2026-03-15
source: extracted from CI config + team discussion
---
All production deploys must go through the CI/CD pipeline.
No manual deploys, no direct pushes to production, no ad-hoc scripts.
Rationale: Manual deploys caused two outages in Q1. The pipeline
runs tests, lint, security scan, and canary deployment before promoting.
Enforcement levels explained
Not all decisions carry the same weight. AXME Code knows the difference.
Required
The agent must follow this decision. No exceptions. "All deploys via CI/CD only," "no direct push to main." Violations are flagged as errors.
enforce: required
Advisory
The agent should follow this decision by default. "Use conventional commits," "PRs under 400 lines." Can deviate with a good reason.
enforce: advisory
Deduplication built in
CLAUDE.md accumulates duplicates. AXME Code doesn't.
Without deduplication
- Use Zod for validation
- Always validate with Zod
- Validation: use Zod, not Joi
- Remember: Zod for all schemas
4 lines saying the same thing
With AXME Code
D-007-use-zod-for-validation.md
enforce: required
date: 2026-02-10
1 decision. Deduplicated by title.
Decisions are deduplicated by normalized title. When the agent or auditor tries to save a decision that already exists, it updates the existing one instead of creating a duplicate. Your knowledge base stays clean.
Move beyond CLAUDE.md
Structured decisions with enforcement levels. One command to install.
# Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AxmeAI/axme-code/main/install.sh | bash
# Setup — decisions extracted automatically
cd your-project && axme-code setup
# Use Claude Code as usual
claude