Paper 1 · Question 45

A: Personal preferences are per-developer, so they live at user level, which is not shared via version control. Firm- wide standards and client conventions must reach everyone who works on a project, so they belong at the project level, which is committed to the repository and distributed on clone; firm-wide standards can be kept in a shared file and pulled into each project's CLAUDE.md with an @import to stay modular. Putting shared standards at the user level is the classic hierarchy bug, where a colleague who clones a project would not receive them. Subsystem rules belong at the directory level or in path-scoped .claude/rules/.

B: User-level ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md applies only to the individual developer and is not shared via version control. Placing firm-wide standards there means a colleague who clones a client project does not receive them, which is the classic configuration-hierarchy bug. Shared standards belong at the project level.

C: Combining all configuration levels into a single file defeats the purpose of the hierarchy. Personal preferences would be version-controlled and shared with the team, firm-wide standards would need duplication across 12 projects, and the file would be bloated with subsystem rules that only apply to specific directories.

D: User-level CLAUDE.md loads for every session across all projects. Importing 12 client project configurations into the user-level file would load all client conventions for every project, wasting tokens and causing conflicting instructions.