written quite a bit about how maximize the effectiveness of Claude Code. I’ve written about specific techniques I apply every time I’m using the tool. Nevertheless, there are other focus areas you’ll be able to must get much more out of Claude Code. Today, I’ll be talking about one in every of them: Making all information accessible to Claude Code.
I’ll discuss how I be sure that almost the whole lot I do is each tracked and stored locally on my computer, inside a selected master folder, where all information is contained. I, for instance, store:
- All my marketing material, like LinkedIn posts, X posts, and webinars
- The entire code I write
- Knowledge I acquire
And each other piece of knowledge I encounter during my workday. If it’s not stored locally on my computer, it should not less than be accessible for Claude Code, for instance, via the Notion API.
I’m not sponsored by Claude Code within the writing of this text; I’m simply an avid user of the product.
Why do you might want to make information accessible?
Most developers know that it’s best practice to document the whole lot they do. Nevertheless, documentation can sometimes feel time-consuming and boring, and is thus not at all times done.
I might argue, nonetheless, that not documenting a variety of what you do is more time-consuming in the long term. You spend more time trying to search out information that will not be there or having to determine information again since you didn’t store it earlier.
Entering into a habit of storing all the data you encounter is incredibly useful, especially when you’ll be able to have quick access to all of this information with an AI agent. Moreover, if you happen to actively use an AI agent to finish a variety of your tasks, it would perform higher because you have got given it quite a bit more context with the documentation you’ve given it.
Simpler put:
It’s best to store all of your information since it saves you time and it makes your AI agents more efficient.
The best way to make all information accessible to Claude Code
Making all information accessible to Claude Code essentially consists of two steps.
- Store all the data you encounter.
- Keep it in a folder that Claude Code has access to.
I’ll have one section per step to dive deeper into the best way to do it in practice.
Store all the data you encounter
This task sounds super easy, and in theory, it is extremely easy, since you simply must store all context locally in your computer. In practice, nonetheless, it’s a bit harder. The explanation for that is that storing such information may be time-consuming, and in lots of cases, information is barely communicated orally and never in a written manner, so you have got to explicitly take motion so as to store it.
I even have two recommendations to make storing all information easier. Primary is using a transcription tool resembling MacWhisper or Superwhisper. These tools make it super easy to press a single button, speak to your computer, and have the text quickly written down.
This lowers the brink for writing a variety of information to your computer, which is super priceless if you would like to store a variety of information. Moreover, that is incredibly priceless when prompting Claude Code as well, and it saves me many hours each week. Just this week, it’s already saved me 4 hours of writing time.
The second is to maintain the motto of storing all the data behind your head in any respect times. If you happen to continually remind yourself of the advantages of writing things down and having it accessible for later, it would be easier to use this principle. I, for instance, have specific task reminders that remind me to jot down down general knowledge I’ve learned several times per week.
Moreover, you need to give Claude Code access to all pieces of knowledge it needs access to. You possibly can, for instance, give it access to your Notion page where you retain a variety of your documentation. You possibly can give it access to mail or Slack messages. In fact, you might want to consider the safety concerns regarding connecting to those applications.
If you happen to need a safer option, you may as well download content as PDFs or text files and store it locally, which, in fact, reduces or completely eliminates many of the security concerns.
I personally download essentially the most critical pieces of knowledge, resembling the best customer profile, the documentation for our CDK stack, marketing material, and so forth, to store them as local files and make them accessible for my agent in the long run.
Access the data
Now that you just’ve stored your entire information, you just must access it. There are, in fact, many tools on the market that may access or search folders of knowledge and in addition access external information via APIs.
Personally, I take advantage of Claude Code since it has a straightforward setup. You possibly can easily access each piece of knowledge I store locally on my computer, and I’ve noticed it’s super effective at navigating my folders and finding the relevant files and data I need to search out.
Claude Code doesn’t use vector search and as an alternative uses bash commands to look through the folders. Anthropic has itself commented on the undeniable fact that the primary versions of the tool began with vector search, but they discovered that searching files with bash commands gives higher quality output, though it’s a bit slower in lots of cases.
If you happen to want faster access, you’ll be able to consider some options that index your folder and make it accessible much faster via retrieval augmented generation.
Some examples of this are Warp Terminal, where you’ll be able to index code bases, and it’s an important example of a tool I take advantage of when I want to search out information quickly on my computer. If I do know a chunk of knowledge is there, and I just need to search out the situation of it, I’ll typically use Warp as an alternative of Cloud Code because I do know it could actually access the data faster.
An alternative choice you have got is to make use of Cursor. Cursor also indexes your code bases and might access the data quickly, identical to Warp. There are in fact many other good options on the market that does essentially the very same thing.
What to take into consideration when storing all information
The primary thing you might want to take into consideration when storing your entire information is security concerns. In fact, though making all of this information accessible is incredibly powerful and can make you and your coding agent far simpler, it also poses a risk because all the data is accessible locally in your computer, and it’s also sent to an LLM, which has its own security concerns.
One thing you would possibly take into consideration is API keys. You may store a variety of your API keys locally. And you need to attempt to avoid files containing these keys being read and sent to an LLM inference provider resembling Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
One other thing to consider is permissions. Once you run Claude Code, it would initially ask for permission to perform commands for reading specific folders.
You possibly can auto-allow this by either whitelisting specific commands or simply running dangerously skip permissions. This can naturally skip all permissions prompts and make all files accessible to Claude Code without it needing to ask for permission. In fact, this makes fetching information simpler since you don’t must interact with AI as much, but you furthermore mght run the chance of it accessing information that it shouldn’t.
Overall, it’s as much as you to be sure that you follow security best practices while still maintaining the efficiency gain that you just get from storing all of your information locally and accessing it with a coding agent.
Conclusion
In this text, I’ve discussed how I store all the data I encounter locally on my computer to make it available for my coding agent. This makes me far simpler because I can more easily fetch information that I’ve encountered previously. And when my coding agent performs work, it has access to more context. That is incredibly vital if you happen to want your coding agents to perform well and act in accordance with your preferences. I thus highly recommend attempting to store as much information as possible, making it easily accessible to each you and your coding agents.
👉 My free eBook and Webinar:
🚀 10x Your Engineering with LLMs (Free 3-Day Email Course)
📚 Get my free Vision Language Models ebook
💻 My webinar on Vision Language Models
👉 Find me on socials:
💌 Substack
