You're forced to document every check and thought related to development until you're wiring a manual on how to be laid off (unless self employed or otherwise critical).

Which is fine. One should write quality docs and all that. But it seems exactly like training my offshore contract replacement instead of building tools for my own use. Except that income doesn't even go to a human just a black box datacenter company and shareholders.

I find project-wide or subpackage-wide (for sufficiently large projects) CLAUDE.md's that document patterns (including for tests) solves this.

/init will make a project-wide one, or you can instruct it to "Create CLAUDE.md in any sub-directory that is sufficiently complex" then modify from there.