Running Claude Code in a Clean Environment

By Joel Dare - Written August 17, 2026

I wanted to start Claude Code without all of my personal customizations. This allows me to evaluate a set of project-related skills without interference from all of my personal prompts, skills, and configuration.

This is easy to do using the CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR environment variable:

mkdir -p /tmp/claude-clean
CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR=/tmp/claude-clean claude