Generate a CONTRIBUTING.md for Your Project
A missing or outdated CONTRIBUTING.md means every new contributor asks the same questions in issues or PRs. Claude can read your project structure and write a complete guide in one pass.
Read the project structure, package.json, and any existing docs,
then write a CONTRIBUTING.md. Include: how to set up the dev
environment, branching and commit message conventions, how to
run tests, the PR process, and code style guidelines.
Claude produces a guide tailored to your actual stack — not a generic template:
## Development Setup
1. Clone the repo and install dependencies:
\`\`\`bash
git clone https://github.com/you/project
npm install
cp .env.example .env
\`\`\`
2. Start the development server: `npm run dev`
## Branching Convention
- `feature/short-description` for new features
- `fix/short-description` for bug fixes
- Branch from `main`, PR back to `main`
## Running Tests
\`\`\`bash
npm run test # unit tests
npm run test:e2e # Playwright E2E suite
\`\`\`
You can ask Claude to tailor the tone too — formal for enterprise OSS, casual for a personal project. It will also add sections for first-time contributors, a code of conduct pointer, and a "good first issue" guide if you ask.
A good CONTRIBUTING.md is a force multiplier — it answers questions before they're asked and makes your repo approachable to contributors who don't know you.
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Set up Claude Code as an automated reviewer in your CI pipeline — on every pull request, it reads the diff, checks for bugs, security issues, missing tests, and convention violations, then posts its findings as a PR comment. Your human reviewers get a head start because the obvious issues are already flagged before they look.
Before deploying, tell Claude to read your project — migrations, environment variables, queue workers, scheduled tasks, caching, third-party integrations — and generate a deployment checklist that's specific to your app. Not a generic "did you run migrations?" list, but one that knows YOUR infrastructure and catches the things YOUR deploy can break.
Instead of writing a README from memory or copying a template, tell Claude to read your project and generate one that's actually accurate — real setup instructions from your config, real architecture from your directory structure, real API examples from your routes, and real prerequisites from your dependency files.