Use Claude to Write Architecture Decision Records
Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) capture why you made a technical choice, not just what you chose. They're invaluable six months later — and Claude can write them from a quick explanation.
Ask Claude: "I chose PostgreSQL over MongoDB because our data has strong relational
requirements and we need ACID transactions. Write an ADR using the Nygard format,
including alternatives we considered and their trade-offs."
Claude generates a properly structured Markdown ADR covering context, the decision, alternatives considered, and consequences:
# ADR-001: Use PostgreSQL for Primary Data Store
## Status
Accepted
## Context
Our application manages financial transactions requiring strong consistency
guarantees and complex relational queries across multiple entities.
## Decision
We will use PostgreSQL as the primary data store.
## Alternatives Considered
- **MongoDB**: Rejected — flexible schema offers little benefit given our
well-defined domain model, and lack of multi-document ACID transactions
is a hard constraint.
## Consequences
✅ Full ACID compliance for transaction integrity
✅ Mature tooling and ORM support across all team languages
❌ Horizontal write scaling requires more planning than document stores
To backfill ADRs for an existing project, ask Claude to read your CLAUDE.md, README, and key config files, then generate records for the decisions already baked in.
Teams that write ADRs make better future decisions — because the painful trade-offs of the past are never forgotten.
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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.