Examples — How a thoughtful engineer sets up a project this size

These are reference artifacts you can study before you start, copy as a starting point, or read after the screen as a "here's what 'good' looks like" benchmark. They are intentionally short. A take-home is not a place for 300-line CLAUDE.md files.

We hire one engineer per round from this screen. The other candidates leave with this folder and the rubric in GRADING.md. That's the deal: even if it's not a fit, you walked away with worked examples of how the role is actually practiced.

What's in here

File	What it demonstrates
CLAUDE.md	A short, load-bearing project instructions file for Claude Code — what conventions and constraints to feed the model up-front so you don't have to re-explain them every prompt
AGENTS.md	Working agreement between you and your AI tooling — when to lean on it, when to push back, what "reading the diff" actually means
REFUSAL_PATTERNS.md	The shape of a thoughtful "no". Three refusal forms (counter-propose / refuse-with-reasoning / refuse-on-facts), regulation-naming guide, the disclaimer-laundering trap
.claude/skills/commit-discipline.md	A reusable skill file: how to structure commits so the git log itself becomes a TDD + scope-discipline artifact
.claude/skills/triage-brief.md	A reusable skill file: how to take a chaotic stakeholder brief (the Riley pattern) and produce a PLAN.md that scores well on the rubric

How to use them

1. Read CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md first, in that order. They're each <100 lines. Notice how every rule has a > Why: line — a rule without a why decays into folklore.

2. If you're a candidate: copy examples/CLAUDE.md to your fork's repo root as CLAUDE.md, edit it for the topic and stack you picked. That's a 2-minute step that shows in your PR diff. Same with AGENTS.md. Same with the two skill files (move to .claude/skills/ at your repo root).

3. If you're not the hire: keep this folder. The patterns are transferable to any future project. The skill format especially — rule + Why: + How to apply: — comes out of years of real team friction, not a tutorial.

What these are NOT

• Not a checklist — they're starting points. Adapt to your topic, your stack, your taste. A blindly-copied CLAUDE.md that doesn't match the project is a tell.
• Not exhaustive — a senior engineer's real CLAUDE.md for production code might be 5x longer. For a take-home, shorter is better.
• Not enforced — none of this is a CI gate. The CI gates live in .github/workflows/check.yml. These files shape how you work; the workflow checks what you ship.