What I wish I had known before my first long Claude Code session

What I wish I'd known before my first long Claude Code session I've been running Claude Code for weeks now, including overnight autonomous sessions. Here's what I'd tell myself on day one. The first hour matters more than you think The setup time at the start of a session determines most of what happens. A 10-minute investment in a clear task file, specific constraints, and an explicit stop condition saves hours later. I skipped this constantly at first because I wanted to get to the actual work. The sessions where I skipped it were my most expensive sessions. "Continue from where you left off" is not a plan This instruction sounds reasonable and produces bad results. The agent will reconstruct context from recent commits and memory, which is imprecise. It'll make assumptions about what's in progress that might be wrong. Instead: write a one-sentence state description in the task file before ending each session. "Added validation middleware to routes/api.js, tests pass, next step is th