How I Gave Claude Code a Deterministic Toolbox (and Stopped It Guessing How to Run My Project)

If you’ve spent any real time pairing with Claude Code, you’ve seen the dance. You ask it to run the tests. It reads your README. Maybe it finds a Makefile , maybe a package.json , maybe a scripts/ directory. It tries make test . That fails. It tries npm test . Wrong project. It cat s your Makefile, parses the targets, picks one, runs it with the wrong arguments. Three tool calls and 2,000 tokens…