30 min and your Claude becomes a truly trained specialist

what actually affects its performance:

1. Set up your workspace so new chats aren’t created outside a project

2. Large, reliable data sources for the knowledge base

3. A clear “don’t” list often works better than only positive instructions

4. Combine MCP, skills, and projects into one system

5. Separate memory for each project with three levels of access

the people who set this up properly get output that looks like a trained specialist shipped it