Make Claude start every reply with your name

One line in your Claude rules file and you'll never lose a session to drift again.

It's called a canary. You add a single instruction: start every reply with my name.

While Claude keeps using your name, your rules are loading and it's reading them. The moment it forgets, you know the session has drifted. Your instructions are no longer landing.

Claude doesn't go from working perfectly to being confidently wrong in one step. It drops one small instruction first. Then it starts making assumptions. Then it gives you something that sounds certain but is wrong.

The name catches that first slip. You clear the session and start fresh before it wastes your afternoon.

Thirty seconds to add to your CLAUDE.md file:

Start every reply with my name, followed by a colon.

That's it. Next session, if you see your name at the start of every reply, your rules are loading. If it stops, you know.

I've used this for six months. The number of times it's flagged a drifting session before I noticed anything else is high enough that I'd never run a long session without it now.

Add it to your rules file today. It works from the first session.