One Instruction File for the Team, One for You

You want personal notes (my sandbox database is at, my scratch directory is) without pushing them into the file your team shares.

The reason to bother splitting anything up: in a single enormous instruction file, every line competes equally for the same attention, so the rule you actually care about isn't distinct from the one you don't. Layering is how the rules that matter stay visible instead of buried in noise.

CLAUDE.local.md: a personal instruction file that sits in the project root, added to gitignore, never shared with your team.

And the shared file can import others with @ syntax (a reference that pulls a document in by pointer instead of pasting its contents): Git workflow: @docs/git-instructions.md, or even a path in your home directory.

Layered configuration: team rules in git, personal quirks local, long documents linked rather than pasted.