Folders, permissions, and keeping it simple

The first days with Claude Code are mostly plumbing — account connections, a security warning from your computer about an installer, an error like "fatal: not a git repository" that sounds like the computer is dying and actually means almost nothing. If your first days feel like that, it's not you, and it's temporary.

Two habits cut that time roughly in half.

One folder per project. Claude Code works inside whatever folder you start it from, and that folder is its whole world. So give every project its own plainly-named home ("workout-app", "newsletter", "trip-planner"), keep the related files in it, and start Claude from there. When work is spread across unrelated folders it gets confusing fast, for Claude and for you. When each project has one home, everyone involved knows where things are. And once you're running multiple projects at the same time, you can take this further — iTerm profiles can give each project its own tab color, so you can tell at a glance which one you're looking at. More on this in a later post.

A quick word on what Claude can see: it reads what's inside the folders you give it — that's the whole point — but it also means a folder is only as private as what you keep in it. Before you point Claude at one, take a minute to make sure nothing sensitive lives in there. Once that's true, giving it read access is safe, and you can stop wondering about it.

Read the permission asks. Claude asks before it acts: read this file? run this command? change this? Early on the asks feel like noise, and it's tempting to approve everything quickly. A sorting rule that holds up:

• Reading and searching: say yes freely — once the folder itself is clean, looking at things is safe.
• Creating and editing files inside the project folder: say yes once you've agreed on the plan.
• Anything that deletes, sends, spends, or publishes: slow down and actually read it. This last category is where all the real risk lives, so it deserves your full attention every time.

And the rule worth underlining: keep it simple. Claude Code will let you build elaborate permission rules and custom settings from day one, and you shouldn't. The defaults are sensible. Real rules are worth writing only after a few weeks of noticing which asks keep annoying you and which ones save you — let your own experience tell you what to change, one rule at a time, instead of engineering a system for problems you haven't had yet.

The plumbing days end, usually within the first week, and everything after that is about the actual work.