Comment by johndough
3 hours ago
I think it is hilarious that there are four different ways to set settings (settings.json config file, environment variable, slash commands and magical chat keywords).
That kind of consistency has also been my own experience with LLMs.
To be fair, I can think of reasons why you would want to be able to set them in various ways.
- settings.json - set for machine, project
- env var - set for an environment/shell/sandbox
- slash command - set for a session
- magical keyword - set for a turn
You are yet to discover the joys of the managed settings scope. They can be set three ways. The claude.ai admin console; by one of two registry keys e.g. HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\ClaudeCode; and by an alphabetically merged directory of json files.
It's not unique to LLMs. Take BASH: you've got `/etc/profile`, `~/.bash_profile,` `~/.bash_login`, `~/.bashrc`, `~/.profile`, environment variables, and shell options.
Especially some settings are in setting.json, and others in .claude.json So sometimes I have to go through both to find the one I want to tweak