Using Claude goals through small task files

Even with years of software development experience in companies, Claude’s /goal instructions can feel hard to use outside a very narrow task. One practical setup is to keep a ./tasks folder with separate markdown files for work that is still to do, already done, or currently being handled by the AI agent. Every change becomes its own task file, and the next task is prepared while the agent works on the current one.

This lets the product grow step by step without defining the whole system in detail upfront. After each task is implemented, git add and git commit are used to save the change as a clear checkpoint. Project instructions live in ./AGENTS.md, while ./CLAUDE.md only tells Claude to read ./AGENTS.md.

As the app grows, more design documents are added, such as ./docs/SCHEMA.md, ./docs/DESIGN.md, ./docs/API.md, ./docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, ./docs/NAVIGATION.md, and ./docs/SECURITY.md. The architecture document is treated as the most important one because it explains the shape of the whole system.