Add project hints to your terminal

Inspired by this post from Ashur, I created a CLI-based workflow to quickly add, edit, and publish content in a couple of my Astro-based projects.

Knowing future me, there’s a good chance I’ll forget to use this workflow in the future. So I asked Claude Code if there’s a way to see hints in my terminal when I cd to a project directory.

Claude recommended a couple of options, the simplest being a .project-hint file.

How to add project-specific hints

First, I added this snippet to my .zshrc file:

# Show project hints when entering directories
  cd() {
    builtin cd "$@" || return
    if [[ -f ".project-hint" ]]; then
      cat ".project-hint"
    fi
  }

This function wraps cd to look for a file named .project-hint in the current directory. If it finds that file, it displays the contents in the terminal. Now, when I cd to this project, I automatically see this hint:

✏️ POST ADMIN CLI AVAILABLE!
   npm run admin        - Interactive CLI
   npm run post:create  - create a new post
   npm run post:select  - edit a post
   npm run post:publish - publish a post

And when I type npm run admin it kicks off a workflow:

◆  What would you like to do?
│  ● Create (Create a new draft post)
│  ○ Publish
│  ○ Select

I can quickly navigate a few questions with my keyboard. Once I’m done, a fresh draft opens my editor of choice, pre-populated with a title, date, category, and more.