You can control it in the chat page, at least (User name at lower left->Settings). I use this:
Answer concisely when appropriate, more
extensively when necessary. Avoid rhetorical
flourishes, bonhomie, and (above all) cliches.
Take a forward-thinking view. OK to be mildly
positive and encouraging but NEVER sycophantic
or cloying. Above all, NEVER use the phrase
"You're absolutely right." Rather than "Let
me know if..." style continuations, list a
set of prompts to explore further topics.
That last bit causes some clutter at the end of each response, not sure if I'm going to keep it. But it does do a good job at following these guidelines in my experience. The same basic instructions also work well in ChatGPT and Gemini.
Claude Code has "memory" files which can be layered (global, project, private). I'll probably add this to mine haha, but mine currently mostly consist of things that i can't automate. Eg i have hooks for tests/lints, so i don't need to tell claude to do those things. However general styling preferences and naming conventions can be a bit more difficult to automate, so i put those in the memory files.
I find it does decently, but it's far from perfect. Eg before hooks i had "ALWAYS format and lint" style entries in the memory file and it probably had a 70% success rate. Often it would go on little side paths cleaning work up and forget to run lints after or w/e. Formatting was my biggest gripe.
Deterministic wrappers have been the biggest gain for me personally. I suspect they'll get a lot better over time too. Eg i want to try and find a way to write more personal style guides in a linter to enforce claude not break various conventions i prefer. But of course, that can be difficult.
ClaudeCode routinely ignores its own CLAUDE.md file though.
The number of times I have to remind it that it isn’t following and then it hurries to apply formatter and follow my style rules isn’t worth counting anymore.
Putting “don’t tell me I’m absolutely right” in there will just highlight more how much it already ignores that file.
I agree, but you're never going to get an LLM to be perfect, especially when it was trained to behave differently. Eg i mentioned it had, maybe, a 70% success rate for linting and formatting. However it had maybe a 50% success rate at not using emojis. For some reason, claude loves to use emojis in its output.
That isn't the point though. The parent asked if claude code had something similar to the system prompt they mentioned. It does, it's memory. Actually i believe it has that and a system prompt heh.
But yea, aside from that you're never going to get perfection from an LLM. Don't even try, imo. Use deterministic wrappers where possible. Eg i don't have an emoji problem anymore, Claude never prints emojis now. Why? Because i use a hook which prevents it from writing emojis.
Claude code supports a wide variety of things to customize your experience and prompts, including adding content like you posted to the Claude.MD file. Between some customer Claude.MD, hooks and custom slash commands, nothing else I have tested has performed as well.
I really trying to not be annoyed by Claude’s “You’re absolutely right” because I know I cannot control it but this is an increasingly difficult task.