Claude Code 2.1.85: My Python Project Setup After Six Months of Daily Use
Six months of daily Python work leaves marks — in muscle memory, in conventions, and in hard-won opinions about what actually holds up. Developer Peyton Green shared his full Claude Code setup on DEV Community: a CLAUDE.md template, a daily command playbook, and the lessons that only emerge after hundreds of real sessions on a real codebase.
The standout insight is his intentional decision to keep autoAcceptEdits: false. The common wisdom says enabling auto-accept speeds up your workflow, but Green argues it changes the review problem in a way that makes things worse — multiple interdependent edits queue up and land simultaneously, turning incremental review into batch review, which degrades fast. His CLAUDE.md template enforces stack constraints (Python 3.12, ruff, mypy strict, pytest), maps project structure explicitly, and includes a "Don't touch" section covering migrations, .env files, and pinned dependency versions. The 45-minute /clear heuristic is equally concrete: past that point, context drift compounds silently and output quality falls before you notice it.
For Python developers who have been using Claude Code for weeks but feel like they're still guessing at the right setup, this retrospective is the clearest signal of what actually survives daily friction versus what looks good in tutorials. The CLAUDE.md template alone is worth saving as a starting point for any Python project.