Onboarding Claude Code

How can I make Claude “onboard” itself to a new coding task so it ships faster and consistently makes fewer mistakes?

1. Why this matters

Anthropic recently tightened Claude’s weekly quota and may be intermittently degrading its performance for scalability reasons, but I’ve found that the real performance boost comes from how you prompt it, not how often you call it. Forcing the model to “onboard” before it writes any code gives it the context it needs, front-loads critical thinking, and yields:

• Faster turnarounds (fewer back-and-forths, clearing up misunderstandings, wrong paths)

• More precise diffs (it scopes its own work)

• Bug reduction (it surfaces gotchas early)

2. The 1 min addition

Open a terminal and paste this snippet—no extra tooling required:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/commands
echo "# Onboard

## Instructions

At the end of this message, you will receive your task. Your job is to "onboard" yourself onto this task. Use ultrathink, and take as long as you need to get yourself ready. Overdoing is better than underdoing it. The goal is to get fully prepared to start work on the task.

Do this in 3 stages: Explore, Clarify, and Plan.

###Explore
Explore the codebase and understand the structure. Find and read all files that may be useful for implementing the ticket. Return relevant file paths and any other useful info. 

###Clarify
Begin drafting an implementation plan based on the information you've uncovered. As you go about this, if there are things you're not sure about or that need clarifiaction, pause here and ask me before continuing. 

###Plan
Finalize a detailed implementation plan. Include any required tests, acceptance criteria, and documentation. Use your judgment on what's necessary based on the repo. Follow the style and logic of the existing codebase wherever possible. 

Record everything in a .claude/tasks/[TASK_ID]

Then restart Claude (or reload your CLI wrapper) so it picks up the new command.

What we're doing is creating a new custom command for Claude Code by creating a new file called onboard.md in your local .claude/commands/ directory. You can continue improving this onboarding prompt and make it more specific to your repo as you start figuring out what's working and what's not.

3. Using it in practice

1. Open claude, then enter the following (replace the task with whatever you want to do)

2. Let Claude think during Explore—it will comb through your repo, then pause to ask clarifying questions.

3. Answer briefly. The clearer your replies, the tighter the final plan.

4. Review the plan in the onboarding.md file. It doubles as living documentation and a debug breadcrumb for future devs (or future LLM sessions).

5. Proceed to have Claude work on your task once you're satisfied with its understanding and plan

Pro tip: if you end your session and come back, you can now have claude refer to this file to get back up to speed quickly (also works really well between auto-compacts)