Slash commands

Most of what you type to Claude is plain English. A handful of things are not requests at all — they are switches you flip on the session itself. Those start with /.

See them all

Type a single / and a list appears. Or ask for it explicitly:

/help

The list grows over time and depends on your setup, so /help is always the honest source of truth. Below are the ones worth knowing on day one.

The seven that matter

You already know four of them. That is the point — there is not much to learn here.

/init is the one people miss

Run it once in any project you will come back to:

/init

Claude reads through your folder and writes a CLAUDE.md file describing what the project is and how it is organised. From then on, it reads that file at the start of every session in this folder.

The payoff is that you stop re-explaining your own project. In a folder with one HTML file the gain is small. In a real project it is the difference between Claude guessing your conventions and knowing them.

Open the CLAUDE.md it wrote and read it. If something is wrong, edit it — it is a plain text file, and correcting it is faster than correcting Claude every session.

Switch as needed, not by habit

/model

A picker opens. Bigger models think harder and cost more of your usage; smaller ones are faster. You do not need to touch this while you are learning — the default is chosen sensibly. Know it exists for when a task is genuinely hard and the answer keeps missing.

Slash command or plain English?

A simple test:

• Changing something about the session? Slash command. /clear, /model, /exit.
• Asking for work? Plain English. "In index.html, make the heading bigger."

Do not dress up a normal request as a command. There is no /refactor. Just say what you want.

Try it now

Run /init in your project folder, then open the CLAUDE.md it created and read it. Change one line so it describes the project the way you would describe it.

Next: pointing Claude at a specific file with @.