What Claude Decides On Its Own
Claude makes hundreds of decisions during a session. Here’s how to think about which ones are yours and which are Claude’s.
Decisions Claude Makes Autonomously
Section titled “Decisions Claude Makes Autonomously”These decisions belong to Claude. You will not be asked about them, but every one is logged to the decision journal so you can review the reasoning at any time.
- All code structure, component composition, file layout, and naming conventions
- How to implement a story given your acceptance criteria
- Which tests to write and what to cover
- How to fix a failing quality gate. Claude diagnoses and retries without interrupting you.
- All git operations: branching, commits, tags, PR creation, and merge
- Visual decisions such as layout, spacing, and component selection when not specified in your materials
- Any technical choice that does not affect visible behaviour or the application’s architecture
Claude takes these decisions because they are well-defined by the tech stack and your acceptance criteria. Asking you about every one would slow the process down without giving you useful control.
Decisions You Make
Section titled “Decisions You Make”These decisions are yours. Claude will not proceed past them without your input.
- What the application should do: the epics and stories you approve before implementation begins
- Whether Claude’s plan is correct before implementation starts
- Whether the built feature matches what you wanted: the browser verification after each epic
- Any decision Claude explicitly surfaces to you. When Claude hits something genuinely ambiguous, it asks rather than guessing.
If something in the materials you dropped into documentation/ is unclear or contradictory, Claude will flag it in the foreground conversation before proceeding.
The Audit Trail
Section titled “The Audit Trail”Every autonomous decision Claude makes is logged to the decision journal, organised by epic. The log records what was decided and why: which component was chosen, which pattern was applied, which ambiguity was resolved in which direction.
The journal is available at any time during the session, not just at epic close. If you want to understand why something was built a certain way, that is the first place to look. See What the Workflow Produces for details on where to find it.