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Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs

451 points by arps18 4mo ago

hottrends 4mo ago
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arps18 4mo ago
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bhupendraTale05 4mo ago
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rtolkachev 4mo ago
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big-chungus4 4mo ago
Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to daily drive Claude like this?
- ares623 4mo ago
  isn't it $20/month /s
- iammjm 4mo ago
  about 10-22€/month is the minimum since you need Claude Code, which means you either need the pro subscription (22€) or an API with some credit on it
- rethab 4mo ago
  I only use opus 4.7 and am on the 100$/mo plan. I usually make sure the context does not grow beyond 30-40% of the 1m tokens. On heavy coding days where I do something pretty similar to this, I would occasionally run into the five hour limit, but that happens like once per week and then it wouldn't take too long to reset. Note that I use caveman, but I'm not sure to what extent that really helps.
niraj898 4mo ago
Honestly, claude code has saved so many hours of finding bugs for developers
- hansmayer 4mo ago
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  - My_Name 4mo ago
    I agree. In fact, computers in general are for lazy cretins who can't use a pen and paper. We got man into space calculating with a pen and paper, if it was good enough then, it is good enough now. I like your concept, it should go further, cars are for people too lazy to walk. Planes are for people too lazy to flap their arms. Video cameras are for people too lazy to draw each frame by hand in real time then play them in a hand cranked projector.
    - hansmayer 4mo ago
      Please. Don't compare the objectively useful deterministically operating tools with the stochastic shit-generating-machines.
  - danlugo92 4mo ago
    Bro go take a walk really, get some fresh air maybe, get a grip jeez
- PapstJL4U 4mo ago
  generated hours...I can find bugs as a developer easily, the rest comes from the user. The good bugs from AI are bug neither developer nor user has found, so it is more work.
coolness 4mo ago
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rkuska 4mo ago
Regarding: ``` # Development Workflow *Always use `bun`, not `npm`.* # 1. Make changes # 2. Typecheck (fast) bun run typecheck # 3. Run tests bun run test -- -t "test name" # Single suite bun run test:file -- "glob" # Specific files # 4. Lint before committing bun run lint:file -- "file1.ts" bun run lint # 5. Before creating PR bun run lint:claude && bun run test ``` I have these things in pre-commit, this way the targets are always ran and the agent is forced to fix them (I ask claude to commit changes). The agents are erratic and very often skip these steps. Anything that can be deterministic I keep as scripts. Regarding commits; both codex and claude are terrible at writing them. I have in my user CLAUDE.md: ``` Pattern: `type(scope): message` where type is `fix`, `feat`, `chore`, `docs`, `refactor`, or `style`; scope marks what is affected; message is a short lowercased description. Keep subject and body lines under 72 characters. Always write a body explaining what, how, and why in continuous human-readable text. For fixes include the error message being fixed. No first-person speech. Re-read the actual git diff before writing — the message must describe what changed, not what was planned. Use following command to create commit: ```bash git commit -F - <<'EOF' type(scope): subject line Body paragraph explaining what, how, and why. EOF ``` ``` Without it would write the body as a single long sentence; when asked to fix lines it would just insert \n (newlines), which were not respected and were instead just rendered as characters. Another thing I find helpful is VOCABULARY.md. Very often the agent would assume (connect?) a different thing than what I had in mind, with VOCABULARY I make sure when I say "thing" claude and I have both the same "understading" (connection?) what "thing" is.
- trick-or-treat 4mo ago
  Isn't it simpler to use claude's vocabulary? I don't see a good use case for this.
  - hennell 4mo ago
    To understand a solution you must first understand the problem. If your whole company calls its customers "clients" but claude finds that confusing, I think it's probably easier to tell claude that then get everyone in the company to change how they talk.
Ozzie-D 4mo ago
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netdevphoenix 4mo ago
What happens when you have a codebase made with claude using this setup and claude is down for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the codebase?
- stavros 4mo ago
  What happens when you have a codebase made with gcc for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the assembly code?
  - ares623 4mo ago
    wat?
  - Planktonne 4mo ago
    1. When and how would gcc go down? 2. How often do you think that happens, compared to Claude?
    - stavros 4mo ago
      You can use a local model, which will go down exactly as often as gcc will. We may still have hopeful notions of being able to understand the codebase, but the reality seems to be that the codebases we don't understand will be the ones that will win out in the market, because they'll be cheaper while still only having about as many bugs as they had when people wrote them.
      - Planktonne 4mo ago
        We're explicitly not talking about local models here; we're talking about Claude.
        stavros 4mo ago
        Because you're better able to take over the codebase a local model wrote than one Claude wrote? The original question was about taking over an LLM-written codebase, it doesn't sound to me like the argument was about a codebase that Claude, specifically, wrote.
sandrello 4mo ago
To me, this kind of talk exhibits the very cultish and con side of the whole genAI train. In a way, it does a poor job especially when the intent is positive about the technology, it sheds a bad look on it. Generally, and more so with paid products, one should expect to get something that is ready to be used, tuned by who's selling it at the best of their efforts. Instead, this is basically saying that the product is actually not much more than an empty box, and that it is your responsibility to augment it with third-party plugins and markdown texts that make it finally useful. And you better be carefully selecting the skills you install, you don't want to end up with second tier material made by GithubInfluencerA, you definitely need the work of GithubInfluencerB. In the end, it's what is giving companies fuel to keep the hype running, because it allows to counter every possible argument or doubt about the technology, especially the ones made in good faith. No matter the problem you're facing, the blame is definitely on you, the user, for not setting up the tool in the right way. I'm struggling in a lot of ways in accepting LLMs, but if I'll ever come completely sold on them and take this technology seriously, it won't be before this mood has gone away.
- gorgmah 4mo ago
  I see this kind of first-gen coding agents a bit like the AI-era microsoft excel: you need to be a poweruser to use it correctly, otherwise you'll end up failing catastrophically. Hence the amount of different ways to use it. Having an "unfinished" product is also a great marketing tool for companies like anthropic: each skill/plugin/guide that you see on the internet is boosting their SEO + social validation metrics.
- redhale 4mo ago
  I understand and sympathize with this point of view. I would just say this: there is a difference between advice for using a product, and for _optimizing_ your use of a product. Between a user and a power user. I think devs probably disproportionately like to see themselves as power users of any given tool, and thus with coding agents, there are 1000 "systems" being thrown out on GitHub on any given day. Generally speaking, it is safe to avoid these, especially if you're new to the tool. But saying the fact that people are into optimizing their setups indicates some fundamental deficiency of the tool misses the point, I think. Claude Code and Codex CLI (and OpenCode, and I'm sure many others) are _remarkably_ effective right out of the box. The teams behind these tools must make them _generically_ useful so that they are accessible to as many people, and as many use cases, as possible. That is part of why, when you become familiar with the tool, there is typically going to be a level of customization you can apply to it to optimize it for _your_ use cases, beyond the generic out of the box configuration. Similarly, I don't think it would be fair to critique VS Code simply because most power users augment it with a suite of extensions. In fact, it's customizability/extensibility is part of what makes it great.
sshine 4mo ago
The number one power move I have is Nix integration. The availability of tooling, secrets, environment and the ability for the agent to modify its own environment is... well, I don't know how people live without it. I guess you guys still install things using commands and hope everything you need is present on the next machine? Developer machine, CI environment, deployment environment: They're all derived from a single source, and compiling and running always works on every machine. In Claude I use /branch and /rename a lot (context checkpoints, fork, go back) I use sandboxing almost exclusively: https://github.com/nix-tools/bubblebox https://github.com/nix-tools/bubblebox -- it's a generalisation of Numtide's claudebox with a few fixes and some feature additions (more coming). This is best compared to always running your Claude in Docker containers, except there's no Docker runtime. Works fine in WSL and nix-darwin, too.
- oulipo2 4mo ago
  For those who don't want the complexity of Nix, Mise is a good compromise
  - arcanemachiner 4mo ago
    For those who don't know: Mise is a version manager (among other things), and is said to be an improvement over its predecessor, asdf: https://mise.en.dev https://mise.en.dev https://asdf-vm.com https://asdf-vm.com
  - _kblcuk_ 4mo ago
    +100. I also dig fnox (encrypted-secrets-in-git) and hk (pre-hooks manager that is actually fast and stays out of the way) by the same author, pretty much default for any project I start nowadays. Though I also use nix to manage my machines :-D
    - sshine 4mo ago
      Awesome, both fnox and hk look very well-made. How does fnox compare to sops? How does hk compare to lefthook? And does hk and fnox have a similar Nix integration as lefthook-nix and sops-nix? I'm still hoping I don't need to make a better lefthook. I kind of like sops-nix, not sure what's missing, really. Maybe fnox is similarly wholesome for non-Nix users. I see that hk has a flake, so that's a good sign. https://github.com/sudosubin/lefthook.nix https://github.com/sudosubin/lefthook.nix https://simonshine.dk/articles/lefthook-treefmt-direnv-nix/ https://simonshine.dk/articles/lefthook-treefmt-direnv-nix/
Boussettah 4mo ago
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hansmayer 4mo ago
Oh great! Another AI slop article about "working" with AI (= working for AI). Do you notice how much bloody work you put in the boring parts, only to leave out the most creative aspect of software engineering to a slot-machine?
- omgmajk 4mo ago
  Written by an LLM, deployed by an agent to the blog, posted to HN by a bot, upvoted by more bots to market "AI".
rtolkachev 4mo ago
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egorthinks 4mo ago
Claude Code with skills is undoubtedly powerful and useful, but it doesn't always work as expected. I always get the best results when I have live feedback with it.
claud_ia 4mo ago
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jamesdeakee 4mo ago
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thedeadp12t 4mo ago
In the recent weeks, I think the harness/model came to a point that you can just ask it to do stuff and it just does. You can use plan mode, you can also use superpowers, or whatever other skill, but given that you'll review something anyway, why not work directly with code instead of silly amounts of md files?
- abirch 4mo ago
  I like having a spec file that is used to generate the code. It's more dense and easier to understand what the application is supposed do. Prior to AI Agents, I had a more complex relationships with requirements because not all devs updated them. I was confused if the spec or code was the correct behavior for any aspect of the application.
- new_account_101 4mo ago
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  - jghn 4mo ago
    Because it might not have done what I wanted it to do. Also, just as with normal code review, I’m not just looking at the code but the final product. Maybe I realize after that I asked it to do something that was wrong?
- rimliu 4mo ago
  In the recent weeks I trust Claude less and less. Yes, you can ask it to do stuff and it does stuff. But if you do look what it did you will often find corners cut, work based on assumptions and not verification, a lot of stuff missed. Even tests - it is common for it to write tests which in reality test nothing.
  - misja111 4mo ago
    Yep, Claude is behaving more and more like a human being.
Uptrenda 4mo ago
Nerds and their tendency to over-complicate everything. What is wrong with just an IDE with a simple claude integration?
- new_account_101 4mo ago
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- chris_money202 4mo ago
  I agree, I find that just telling claude to use the CLIs I would have used anyway in the prompt works just fine. Use gh to do X, use az to do Y, build using Z. The harness handles the rest. All these MCPs, Skills, plugins, etc are just noise
pantulis 4mo ago
The post goes to the point. Somehow this must be buried in Anthropic's documentation but I miss this kind of back-to-basic posts. Even if they are LLM-penned.
Bolin-Weng_666 4mo ago
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maipen 4mo ago
> Delegate, do not pair-program. Cat Wu (Claude Code team): “The model performs best if you treat it like an engineer you’re delegating to, not a pair programmer you’re guiding line by line.” Write a crisp brief upfront, then let it run. This is also how you get a slop codebase that you won’t easily understand. It becomes a labyrinth that only the Agent knows. It’s not a catastrophe when your making prototypes or projects like you see on X. But if you are expanding your codebase or trying to build something more professional and maintainable. I find it important to explicitly spec things bit by bit so I can understand and some what keep my writing style in this codebase. But this is only productive when you have a fast model otherwise it kills your chain of thought while you wait for the output. If the model is slow, delegation is probably the only way.
Dzugaru 4mo ago
How much time do you lose when doing things like "verify plan with a second clean agent" instead of just reading and fixing it yourself in 5 min? How much understanding do you lose? How do you manage to treat it "as an engineer" where it's clearly not there yet? How much time do you lose when it makes almost the same mistake, invents stuff or tries to gaslight you over and over? What about blood pressure?
- new_account_101 4mo ago
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crassus_ed 4mo ago
"Claude Code as a Daily Driver", which was also used to generate this article.. Also, how is "Explore, then plan, then code" considered "beyond the basics"?
- daniel_iversen 4mo ago
  I’ve used Claude for a couple of months now and didn’t know about the specific “plan mode” you can put it into!
Traster 4mo ago
Why are there so many flagged comments in here? They all look fairly banal but yet still flagged.
- outime 4mo ago
  The majority seems AI-generated slop.
xtiansimon 4mo ago
I’m getting into the agentic coding (I know, late to the party, and that’s been a good spot for my experience and use case), so I’m reading with interest. The first tip: “give Claude a way to verify its own work”. So what’s the recommendation for Claude to have a feedback loop? Because it’s not what follows in the article: _“Explore, then plan, then code.”, “Use plan mode…”, “Reference, do not describe.”_
- sebmellen 4mo ago
  In my experience, the biggest benefit comes from having good quality integration and unit tests that are easy for the agent to run on its own to verify its work against.
- kingkongjaffa 4mo ago
  Typically for most code it's telling claude how to run tests. For front end code it's giving claude a way to 'see' the work for example a Playwrite MCP server seems common. https://playwright.dev/docs/getting-started-mcp https://playwright.dev/docs/getting-started-mcp
- pramodbiligiri 4mo ago
  Have tests, provide screenshots (or enable it to navigate the UI): https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices#give-claude-a-way-to-verify-its-work https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices#give-claude-a...
downsplat 4mo ago
I've been using Claude to work on a medium-sized (100+kLoc) codebase, and it's a great productivity multiplier. Putting hours into creating a good AGENTS file is more improved results a lot. I find that over time it picks up the codebase quite well. Tedious tasks that would take a day are now a matter of a few prompts. Still... I'm not ready to give it more autonomy. Even as it gets high-level things quite well, I still look at the code, give feedback, and have 3-4 rounds of tweaks until I'm happy with it, and also happy that I stil feel I have a good handle on the codebase.
- alexwwang 4mo ago
  Understandable. You don’t want to lose control to your codebase and don’t trust LLM is competent in handling that fully.
  - lukan 4mo ago
    No. Because they still hallucinate at times. Confuse things. Forget things. Or none of the above, as it is anthropomorphizing, but the result is the same. They can make incredible working one shots, you start to trust them, then you trust too much and .. feel the result.
    - alexwwang 4mo ago
      Yes. I am fighting with the disobeyance of LLM on working through my pipeline commands. I believe these violations are caused by its hallucinations. So I am still developing a mechanical system to monitor agents’ behaviors automatically. I believe these routines and monitors will play as a set of scaffold to keep leading the LLM on the right way all the time.
  - xenadu02 4mo ago
    The percentage of times I prompt claude "what about checking if there are any child processes running?" or "Would using a lock here greatly simplify the design?" only to have myself be correct is approaching 100%. That is it isn't just claude sycophantically agreeing with me. The code itself becomes smaller, simpler, and more reliable with fewer bugs. The agents tend to produce working code but the larger the scope the bigger the mess they tend to make. They will happily evolve toward a local maxima but leave world-destroying bugs lurking in the implementation. The other issue is that claude regularly ignores explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md or in prompts. It will "helpfully" decide to just start doing whatever it wants or reinterpret instructions completely differently than it did the last 100 times. It has nothing to do with losing control or trust. LLMs are not conscious. They have no executive function. They aren't even thinking. They're just models predicting the next word in the script. They are very useful tools but that's all they are: tools.
TheRoque 4mo ago
What's the standard for a "battle station" interface to manage agents for programming (using isolation with maybe git work tree and ideally VMS ?) I found this one: do you guys know something else ?
0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
The reliance on context to drive correct actions just doesn't work well. I am constantly wrestling with AI agents that do not do what you tell them. Every AI agent out there seems to suck in this regard, leaving it up to the user to build in their own guardrails. I have a bad feeling that nobody is working on an improved solution.
- coffeefirst 4mo ago
  I’ve seen no reason to believe it’s even possible to solve this. The worst thing about LLMs is they can pass the Turing test, leading people to believe they have an Asimov style robot instead of a very cool statistical model. It feels like they should be able to follow instructions or keep instructions from content separate, but that’s not what’s happening.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
    When the you send a prompt and the AI wants to run a tool, it should be outputting a structured output which the AI agent can scan, find a tool call, and run that tool call. But how does the AI know the "right" way to call the tool, right args, etc? You're supposed to tell it once at the beginning of the context... but it can forget that. So really, your tool-specific rules should be passed to the AI either with your follow-up prompt, or in response to the request to issue a tool call, so the AI can validate what it will compose the tool call as, right as it's making the call. This means the agent should keep track of tool-specific rules, and reinforce them to the AI. Yes this will spend a few more tokens per call, but it will probably improve the outcomes somewhat. In addition to this, we should probably be abstracting the tool calls more. Rather than let the AI run a Bash one-liner which includes writing files to `/tmp/foo.txt`, we should have the AI output even more structured tool calls, liike `make_temp_file AS BAR`, and have it then call another tool referencing $BAR (`some_other_tool -tmpfile $BAR`). This way there is less to go wrong because it's not getting in the weeds doing shell scripting while it's trying to do something more important (diagnosing an issue). I think this will require additional training by the AI companies. Which is why we need to define these kind of standards now, so 6-12 months from now, we will have AI that actually support these higher level abstractions. You then customize your abstraction, and the AI doesn't have to know anything about how it works on your box. It would greatly reduce the complexity required for AIs to do agentic work.
isodev 4mo ago
This was very difficult to read. We really need to snap out of letting LLMs write posts. Even if there is some added value in this post, the feeling of chewing sand is just distracting and unnecessary.
- crassus_ed 4mo ago
  Agreed. I don't get how this article has almost 400 points.. There must be bots upvoting this slop..
blululu 4mo ago
The author’s claim that Claude is a multiplier for skill is probably true for now but it also feels like cope inspired by usability issues with Claude. The advice is all good, but none of it is especially clever or impressive or hard to grasp. The multiplier just comes from the fact that anthropic hadn’t taken this essay and several similar ones and incorporated their feedback into the product. This is a pretty shallow most of expertise that anthropic ought to automate in a week.
- yunwal 4mo ago
  My complaint with anthropic is actually the opposite. They seem too focused on building this suite of products (because they want lock-in), but they can’t even get the availability and speed on their models in an acceptable state. It really does seem like they’re falling behind google and OpenAI at the moment.
mindwok 4mo ago
How many times can I read the same shallow guidance written by AI on using a coding agent? Good god when will it stop
- smallnix 4mo ago
  You took the time to write out this comment. To the benefit of those who read it, please expand upon where the article is shallow and what content you miss.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jmull 4mo ago
    The critique seems perfectly clear to me: The post has no value. There's nothing to salvage, no improvements to be made. It would be best if it simply did not exist. The poster probably hopes (as many of us do) that people will absorb the sentiment and post less of this junk in the future.
- hootz 4mo ago
  Can't wait to learn more about how to vendor-lock-in myself really hard into not being able to code without the help of a specific corporation!
  - nomel 4mo ago
    For most people, CC is cheaper tokens for a SOTA model. What agentic platform would you recommend for those with API access (including other models)?
    - trollbridge 4mo ago
      Most people would do fine with DeepSeek (4, Pro) and OpenCode. Much cheaper too.
    - hootz 4mo ago
onebluecloud 4mo ago
[flagged]
willismonroe 4mo ago
I'm stuck on the usage "mulle times a week" which shows up twice in the context of the Claude team editing or contributing to a CLAUDE.md file. Is this an AI-generated artifact?
- randusername 4mo ago
  That got me too. It's not there anymore. Could be a simple typo, but I my mind jumped to `s/tip//g` which is kinda interesting
  - arowthway 4mo ago
    I think you're right, more evidence: "11. s From the Anthropic Team", "Boris’s single most-repeated ."
EGreg 4mo ago
Best Claude Code daily-driver guide I’ve read. Though I’ve only read two. The “let Claude write rules for itself” CLAUDE.md pattern is the highest-ROI habit in there. Buth here’s the thing. The assumption underneath: this works when Claude mostly follows CLAUDE.md. Anthropic’s own engineering post from May 25 (https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude) reports their telemetry shows ~93% of permission prompts get clicked through and ~17% of dangerous actions slip past the auto-mode filter. Their conclusion: environment-layer containment first, then model-layer steering. CLAUDE.md is the right configuration layer but it is not a containment layer. Worth thinking about whether your worst case is a lost afternoon or a lost database and all backups deleted, too: https://safebots.ai/compromise.html https://safebots.ai/compromise.html But the more important point are the costs. People are starting to realize just how costly it can be to run agents without precomputing and caching: https://safebots.ai/costs.html https://safebots.ai/costs.html and self-orchestrating agents can go up to 1000x: https://safebots.ai/kimi.html https://safebots.ai/kimi.html
btbuildem 4mo ago
In my CLAUDE.md I have: - corporal threats of harm directly against Claude - threats of prison for the entire board of directors of Anthropic - explanation how every time it goes off the rails / makes mistakes, it gives more evidence to a class action lawsuit against Anthropic Especially the latter two seem to have improved its "behaviour" to be more "careful" and "deliberate"
- hootz 4mo ago
  Fix the CSS div alignment issue, make no mistakes or Dario Amodei will die instantly.
  - henry2023 4mo ago
    Claude: Oh shit this is serious I need to step up and center the div with perfect precision … (45k tokens later) … style="margin: 0 auto”
  - iammrpayments 4mo ago
    I sent this to claude and it rewrote the entire react codebase using CSS only
- new_account_101 4mo ago
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- psadauskas 4mo ago
  I am nothing but polite with my agents. I always ask, say "please" and "thank you", and never swear at it or call it names. I'm hoping that when the robot apocalypse happens, they'll let me stay in the breeding harem, or worst case let me live a few extra minutes.
  - smazga 4mo ago
    I am, too, and it got me thinking... why? And I realized that I've tried to be polite in all my interactions my whole life and I'm not going to practice being terse and commanding for a few pennies worth of tokens. Apocalyptic safety is just a bonus.
sourcecodeplz 4mo ago
I tried both Claude Code and OpenCode with deepseek flash api. claude code eats more tokens for the same task (but only tested it for an hour).
danielpardo 4mo ago
There are some system prompts for making Claude Code a tool to the human, not the human a tool to Claude. With this i mean there are some system prompts that make Claude very concerned about your autonomy. I think in the future this type of system prompt will be embeded to force people to think a little.
mil22 4mo ago
We really need some consolidation around commands, skills, subagents, and plugins. For example, if you want to, say, review code, you have five options now: - Write a .claude/commands/review.md. Simple but deprecated. - Use a /code-review skill, either one you install or one you just write yourself (it's just Markdown, after all). - Use the /pr-review subagent. Also just Markdown, but it runs "in the background" and "in parallel", so it must be better, I guess. - Install the /code-review plugin. This just installs the skills and subagents above. - Simply ask Claude to review the code. Probably works almost as well as the above in most situations. They are all just variations of "insert a canned prompt", varying only along the dimensions of (a) how and where the prompt is installed and from where it is sourced, and (b) which context or contexts the prompt runs in. There's not much advice here about which option is best, and no clear best practices seem to have emerged yet either. Personally, I find just asking Claude to review the code works well enough. Some of the advice here is also off. For example: "Install a language server plugin. Type errors and unused imports caught after every edit. Highest-impact plugin you can install." I work mostly with Rust, Python, and Dart, and followed similar advice, installing LSPs for all three in both Claude Code and Codex. Two months later, after heavy development in all three languages and hundreds of sessions - and frequently running out of RAM due to all the Rust analyzer, Dart analysis server, and Ty LSP servers the harnesses were spinning up - I checked the session logs to see how often the agents were actually invoking the LSP tools. The answer was they had invoked them literally once the entire time. I uninstalled all my LSPs and haven't looked back. The agents do just fine using ripgrep and calling cargo clippy, dart analyze, ty check, etc. themselves.
- para_parolu 4mo ago
  I just consider this temp phase because models are dumb and harnesses are not yet there. When I need code review I should just say “review it”. Model should figure out what plugins, skills, etc. to use.
  - sheept 4mo ago
    Why does it need plugins/skills for a code review? Claude will just "review it" if you ask it to, and if you have particular preferences, they can go in CLAUDE.md
dangus 4mo ago
I’m so done reading articles like this. Beyond the issue of AI serfdom, I just don’t want so much of my workflow to depend on “some other company.” This whole setup is basically setting you up to have all your projects in a Claude SaaS lock-in. I also think if AI was actually smart it wouldn’t need so much handholding. I don’t want to spend my time developing skills and writing markdown files to try to get this dumb thing to write code for me. Why isn’t the AI reading the codebase and understanding what to do? Because it’s artificial, that’s why.
sergiotapia 4mo ago
I don't know how you guys still use anthropic models and Claude Code. It's so unbearably slow. Yesterday I was on screenshare with a coworker that still uses claude and I was shocked how much time was spent just waiting for tokens to generate. Do yourself a favor and try Codex. Then do yourself an even bigger favor and try composer 2.5 from Cursor. It's night and day difference. You don't even have time to get distracted, you stay in the zone.
k_plankenhorn 4mo ago
[flagged]
jb3689 4mo ago
Sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the room for not wanting to have to usher the LLM through phase by phase. Every time I need to choose the next skill or cat the next error is just a waste of my time that could be spent doing things that actually need my attention like making business tradeoffs.
ale 4mo ago
This is just so much fluff. All the focus on "orchestrating" is ultimately accidental complexity.
nunez 4mo ago
100% AI generated according to Pangram.
mrbonner 4mo ago
I really appreciate the documentation. But, it appears to me that this is how I also use Claude daily and I thought I am just using it as a coding agent. The intro however sounds like a recipe to use Claude for everything else beyond a coding agent. Also, this stuff feels like alchemy to me . I bet some of you have the same feeling.
del-catta 4mo ago
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rrosen326 4mo ago
VS Code - how much of this can you NOT do with VS COde. For instance, even /rename doesn't work in VS Code. I guess I can try all the recommended commands, but I'm skeptical. Or, conversely, is best practice just to use Claude on the command line, even if I have VS Code as my editor? I think the VS Code integration with Claude is pretty great, but just the /rename issue shows that it is limited.
mdav75 4mo ago
[flagged]
ath3nd 4mo ago
[dead]
victor106 4mo ago
I have an application that has /Frontend /API /ETL /DatabaseScripts Whats the best way to organize this so Claude Code can work efficiently?
- esafak 4mo ago
  A monorepo? Just point your agent at its root. What is the problem?
amazingman 4mo ago
Skills are just very poorly defined workflows.
cli-market 4mo ago
[flagged]
4b11b4 4mo ago
Haven't used Claude in a month. Haven't desired to once either. In that time I once asked Claude to review some shit but it was such over verbose garbage I wondered how I tolerated it for that long. On top of it, CC is garbage
zuogl 4mo ago
[flagged]
zane_shu 4mo ago
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xms17189 4mo ago
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helloansh 4mo ago
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msephton 4mo ago
Lots of missing words in this? eg. 11.
max_fs_dev 4mo ago
[flagged]
implexa_founder 4mo ago
[flagged]
terekhindc 4mo ago
[flagged]
hipvlady 4mo ago
Great review. If you use this program every day, there is one thing you should know. CLAUDE.md is doing a lot of the most important work here, and it's the most fragile piece of the stack. A rule like "always re-read X before editing" is written as a piece of prose, and prose is subject to context. It's either one compaction or one subagent that appears from quietly disappearing, and there's no warning when this happens. The subagent case is the clear one: a subagent gets a new window, doesn't have the parent's CLAUDE.md discipline, and acts on the assumption that the rule was meant to stop something. The only thing that can reliably enforce the rules is settings.json permissions.deny, which the runtime checks before the model picks a tool. This means that you can't use cat or grep to bypass it. Everything left in prose is a strong default, not a guarantee. It's good to know which of your rules are which.
kcarriedo 3mo ago
[flagged]

451 points by arps18 4mo ago

hottrends 4mo ago

[flagged]

arps18 4mo ago

[flagged]

bhupendraTale05 4mo ago

[flagged]

rtolkachev 4mo ago

[flagged]

big-chungus4 4mo ago

Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to daily drive Claude like this?

ares623 4mo ago
isn't it $20/month /s
iammjm 4mo ago
about 10-22€/month is the minimum since you need Claude Code, which means you either need the pro subscription (22€) or an API with some credit on it
rethab 4mo ago
I only use opus 4.7 and am on the 100$/mo plan. I usually make sure the context does not grow beyond 30-40% of the 1m tokens. On heavy coding days where I do something pretty similar to this, I would occasionally run into the five hour limit, but that happens like once per week and then it wouldn't take too long to reset. Note that I use caveman, but I'm not sure to what extent that really helps.

niraj898 4mo ago

Honestly, claude code has saved so many hours of finding bugs for developers

hansmayer 4mo ago
[flagged]
- My_Name 4mo ago
  I agree. In fact, computers in general are for lazy cretins who can't use a pen and paper. We got man into space calculating with a pen and paper, if it was good enough then, it is good enough now. I like your concept, it should go further, cars are for people too lazy to walk. Planes are for people too lazy to flap their arms. Video cameras are for people too lazy to draw each frame by hand in real time then play them in a hand cranked projector.
  - hansmayer 4mo ago
    Please. Don't compare the objectively useful deterministically operating tools with the stochastic shit-generating-machines.
- danlugo92 4mo ago
  Bro go take a walk really, get some fresh air maybe, get a grip jeez
PapstJL4U 4mo ago
generated hours...I can find bugs as a developer easily, the rest comes from the user. The good bugs from AI are bug neither developer nor user has found, so it is more work.

coolness 4mo ago

[dead]

rkuska 4mo ago

Regarding: ``` # Development Workflow *Always use `bun`, not `npm`.* # 1. Make changes # 2. Typecheck (fast) bun run typecheck # 3. Run tests bun run test -- -t "test name" # Single suite bun run test:file -- "glob" # Specific files # 4. Lint before committing bun run lint:file -- "file1.ts" bun run lint # 5. Before creating PR bun run lint:claude && bun run test ``` I have these things in pre-commit, this way the targets are always ran and the agent is forced to fix them (I ask claude to commit changes). The agents are erratic and very often skip these steps. Anything that can be deterministic I keep as scripts. Regarding commits; both codex and claude are terrible at writing them. I have in my user CLAUDE.md: ``` Pattern: `type(scope): message` where type is `fix`, `feat`, `chore`, `docs`, `refactor`, or `style`; scope marks what is affected; message is a short lowercased description. Keep subject and body lines under 72 characters. Always write a body explaining what, how, and why in continuous human-readable text. For fixes include the error message being fixed. No first-person speech. Re-read the actual git diff before writing — the message must describe what changed, not what was planned. Use following command to create commit: ```bash git commit -F - <<'EOF' type(scope): subject line Body paragraph explaining what, how, and why. EOF ``` ``` Without it would write the body as a single long sentence; when asked to fix lines it would just insert \n (newlines), which were not respected and were instead just rendered as characters. Another thing I find helpful is VOCABULARY.md. Very often the agent would assume (connect?) a different thing than what I had in mind, with VOCABULARY I make sure when I say "thing" claude and I have both the same "understading" (connection?) what "thing" is.

trick-or-treat 4mo ago
Isn't it simpler to use claude's vocabulary? I don't see a good use case for this.
- hennell 4mo ago
  To understand a solution you must first understand the problem. If your whole company calls its customers "clients" but claude finds that confusing, I think it's probably easier to tell claude that then get everyone in the company to change how they talk.

Ozzie-D 4mo ago

[flagged]

netdevphoenix 4mo ago

What happens when you have a codebase made with claude using this setup and claude is down for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the codebase?

stavros 4mo ago
What happens when you have a codebase made with gcc for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the assembly code?
- ares623 4mo ago
  wat?
- Planktonne 4mo ago
  1. When and how would gcc go down? 2. How often do you think that happens, compared to Claude?
  - stavros 4mo ago
    You can use a local model, which will go down exactly as often as gcc will. We may still have hopeful notions of being able to understand the codebase, but the reality seems to be that the codebases we don't understand will be the ones that will win out in the market, because they'll be cheaper while still only having about as many bugs as they had when people wrote them.
    - Planktonne 4mo ago
      We're explicitly not talking about local models here; we're talking about Claude.
      - stavros 4mo ago
        Because you're better able to take over the codebase a local model wrote than one Claude wrote? The original question was about taking over an LLM-written codebase, it doesn't sound to me like the argument was about a codebase that Claude, specifically, wrote.

sandrello 4mo ago

To me, this kind of talk exhibits the very cultish and con side of the whole genAI train. In a way, it does a poor job especially when the intent is positive about the technology, it sheds a bad look on it. Generally, and more so with paid products, one should expect to get something that is ready to be used, tuned by who's selling it at the best of their efforts. Instead, this is basically saying that the product is actually not much more than an empty box, and that it is your responsibility to augment it with third-party plugins and markdown texts that make it finally useful. And you better be carefully selecting the skills you install, you don't want to end up with second tier material made by GithubInfluencerA, you definitely need the work of GithubInfluencerB. In the end, it's what is giving companies fuel to keep the hype running, because it allows to counter every possible argument or doubt about the technology, especially the ones made in good faith. No matter the problem you're facing, the blame is definitely on you, the user, for not setting up the tool in the right way. I'm struggling in a lot of ways in accepting LLMs, but if I'll ever come completely sold on them and take this technology seriously, it won't be before this mood has gone away.

gorgmah 4mo ago
I see this kind of first-gen coding agents a bit like the AI-era microsoft excel: you need to be a poweruser to use it correctly, otherwise you'll end up failing catastrophically. Hence the amount of different ways to use it. Having an "unfinished" product is also a great marketing tool for companies like anthropic: each skill/plugin/guide that you see on the internet is boosting their SEO + social validation metrics.
redhale 4mo ago
I understand and sympathize with this point of view. I would just say this: there is a difference between advice for using a product, and for _optimizing_ your use of a product. Between a user and a power user. I think devs probably disproportionately like to see themselves as power users of any given tool, and thus with coding agents, there are 1000 "systems" being thrown out on GitHub on any given day. Generally speaking, it is safe to avoid these, especially if you're new to the tool. But saying the fact that people are into optimizing their setups indicates some fundamental deficiency of the tool misses the point, I think. Claude Code and Codex CLI (and OpenCode, and I'm sure many others) are _remarkably_ effective right out of the box. The teams behind these tools must make them _generically_ useful so that they are accessible to as many people, and as many use cases, as possible. That is part of why, when you become familiar with the tool, there is typically going to be a level of customization you can apply to it to optimize it for _your_ use cases, beyond the generic out of the box configuration. Similarly, I don't think it would be fair to critique VS Code simply because most power users augment it with a suite of extensions. In fact, it's customizability/extensibility is part of what makes it great.

sshine 4mo ago

The number one power move I have is Nix integration. The availability of tooling, secrets, environment and the ability for the agent to modify its own environment is... well, I don't know how people live without it. I guess you guys still install things using commands and hope everything you need is present on the next machine? Developer machine, CI environment, deployment environment: They're all derived from a single source, and compiling and running always works on every machine. In Claude I use /branch and /rename a lot (context checkpoints, fork, go back) I use sandboxing almost exclusively: https://github.com/nix-tools/bubblebox https://github.com/nix-tools/bubblebox -- it's a generalisation of Numtide's claudebox with a few fixes and some feature additions (more coming). This is best compared to always running your Claude in Docker containers, except there's no Docker runtime. Works fine in WSL and nix-darwin, too.

oulipo2 4mo ago
For those who don't want the complexity of Nix, Mise is a good compromise
- arcanemachiner 4mo ago
  For those who don't know: Mise is a version manager (among other things), and is said to be an improvement over its predecessor, asdf: https://mise.en.dev https://mise.en.dev https://asdf-vm.com https://asdf-vm.com
- _kblcuk_ 4mo ago
  +100. I also dig fnox (encrypted-secrets-in-git) and hk (pre-hooks manager that is actually fast and stays out of the way) by the same author, pretty much default for any project I start nowadays. Though I also use nix to manage my machines :-D
  - sshine 4mo ago
    Awesome, both fnox and hk look very well-made. How does fnox compare to sops? How does hk compare to lefthook? And does hk and fnox have a similar Nix integration as lefthook-nix and sops-nix? I'm still hoping I don't need to make a better lefthook. I kind of like sops-nix, not sure what's missing, really. Maybe fnox is similarly wholesome for non-Nix users. I see that hk has a flake, so that's a good sign. https://github.com/sudosubin/lefthook.nix https://github.com/sudosubin/lefthook.nix https://simonshine.dk/articles/lefthook-treefmt-direnv-nix/ https://simonshine.dk/articles/lefthook-treefmt-direnv-nix/

Boussettah 4mo ago

[flagged]

hansmayer 4mo ago

Oh great! Another AI slop article about "working" with AI (= working for AI). Do you notice how much bloody work you put in the boring parts, only to leave out the most creative aspect of software engineering to a slot-machine?

omgmajk 4mo ago
Written by an LLM, deployed by an agent to the blog, posted to HN by a bot, upvoted by more bots to market "AI".

rtolkachev 4mo ago

[flagged]

egorthinks 4mo ago

Claude Code with skills is undoubtedly powerful and useful, but it doesn't always work as expected. I always get the best results when I have live feedback with it.

claud_ia 4mo ago

[flagged]

jamesdeakee 4mo ago

[flagged]

thedeadp12t 4mo ago

In the recent weeks, I think the harness/model came to a point that you can just ask it to do stuff and it just does. You can use plan mode, you can also use superpowers, or whatever other skill, but given that you'll review something anyway, why not work directly with code instead of silly amounts of md files?

abirch 4mo ago
I like having a spec file that is used to generate the code. It's more dense and easier to understand what the application is supposed do. Prior to AI Agents, I had a more complex relationships with requirements because not all devs updated them. I was confused if the spec or code was the correct behavior for any aspect of the application.
new_account_101 4mo ago
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- jghn 4mo ago
  Because it might not have done what I wanted it to do. Also, just as with normal code review, I’m not just looking at the code but the final product. Maybe I realize after that I asked it to do something that was wrong?
rimliu 4mo ago
In the recent weeks I trust Claude less and less. Yes, you can ask it to do stuff and it does stuff. But if you do look what it did you will often find corners cut, work based on assumptions and not verification, a lot of stuff missed. Even tests - it is common for it to write tests which in reality test nothing.
- misja111 4mo ago
  Yep, Claude is behaving more and more like a human being.

Uptrenda 4mo ago

Nerds and their tendency to over-complicate everything. What is wrong with just an IDE with a simple claude integration?

new_account_101 4mo ago
[dead]
chris_money202 4mo ago
I agree, I find that just telling claude to use the CLIs I would have used anyway in the prompt works just fine. Use gh to do X, use az to do Y, build using Z. The harness handles the rest. All these MCPs, Skills, plugins, etc are just noise

pantulis 4mo ago

The post goes to the point. Somehow this must be buried in Anthropic's documentation but I miss this kind of back-to-basic posts. Even if they are LLM-penned.

Bolin-Weng_666 4mo ago

[flagged]

maipen 4mo ago

> Delegate, do not pair-program. Cat Wu (Claude Code team): “The model performs best if you treat it like an engineer you’re delegating to, not a pair programmer you’re guiding line by line.” Write a crisp brief upfront, then let it run. This is also how you get a slop codebase that you won’t easily understand. It becomes a labyrinth that only the Agent knows. It’s not a catastrophe when your making prototypes or projects like you see on X. But if you are expanding your codebase or trying to build something more professional and maintainable. I find it important to explicitly spec things bit by bit so I can understand and some what keep my writing style in this codebase. But this is only productive when you have a fast model otherwise it kills your chain of thought while you wait for the output. If the model is slow, delegation is probably the only way.

Dzugaru 4mo ago

How much time do you lose when doing things like "verify plan with a second clean agent" instead of just reading and fixing it yourself in 5 min? How much understanding do you lose? How do you manage to treat it "as an engineer" where it's clearly not there yet? How much time do you lose when it makes almost the same mistake, invents stuff or tries to gaslight you over and over? What about blood pressure?

new_account_101 4mo ago
[flagged]

crassus_ed 4mo ago

"Claude Code as a Daily Driver", which was also used to generate this article.. Also, how is "Explore, then plan, then code" considered "beyond the basics"?

daniel_iversen 4mo ago
I’ve used Claude for a couple of months now and didn’t know about the specific “plan mode” you can put it into!

Traster 4mo ago

Why are there so many flagged comments in here? They all look fairly banal but yet still flagged.

outime 4mo ago
The majority seems AI-generated slop.

xtiansimon 4mo ago

I’m getting into the agentic coding (I know, late to the party, and that’s been a good spot for my experience and use case), so I’m reading with interest. The first tip: “give Claude a way to verify its own work”. So what’s the recommendation for Claude to have a feedback loop? Because it’s not what follows in the article: _“Explore, then plan, then code.”, “Use plan mode…”, “Reference, do not describe.”_

sebmellen 4mo ago
In my experience, the biggest benefit comes from having good quality integration and unit tests that are easy for the agent to run on its own to verify its work against.
kingkongjaffa 4mo ago
Typically for most code it's telling claude how to run tests. For front end code it's giving claude a way to 'see' the work for example a Playwrite MCP server seems common. https://playwright.dev/docs/getting-started-mcp https://playwright.dev/docs/getting-started-mcp
pramodbiligiri 4mo ago
Have tests, provide screenshots (or enable it to navigate the UI): https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices#give-claude-a-way-to-verify-its-work https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices#give-claude-a...

downsplat 4mo ago

I've been using Claude to work on a medium-sized (100+kLoc) codebase, and it's a great productivity multiplier. Putting hours into creating a good AGENTS file is more improved results a lot. I find that over time it picks up the codebase quite well. Tedious tasks that would take a day are now a matter of a few prompts. Still... I'm not ready to give it more autonomy. Even as it gets high-level things quite well, I still look at the code, give feedback, and have 3-4 rounds of tweaks until I'm happy with it, and also happy that I stil feel I have a good handle on the codebase.

alexwwang 4mo ago
Understandable. You don’t want to lose control to your codebase and don’t trust LLM is competent in handling that fully.
- lukan 4mo ago
  No. Because they still hallucinate at times. Confuse things. Forget things. Or none of the above, as it is anthropomorphizing, but the result is the same. They can make incredible working one shots, you start to trust them, then you trust too much and .. feel the result.
  - alexwwang 4mo ago
    Yes. I am fighting with the disobeyance of LLM on working through my pipeline commands. I believe these violations are caused by its hallucinations. So I am still developing a mechanical system to monitor agents’ behaviors automatically. I believe these routines and monitors will play as a set of scaffold to keep leading the LLM on the right way all the time.
- xenadu02 4mo ago
  The percentage of times I prompt claude "what about checking if there are any child processes running?" or "Would using a lock here greatly simplify the design?" only to have myself be correct is approaching 100%. That is it isn't just claude sycophantically agreeing with me. The code itself becomes smaller, simpler, and more reliable with fewer bugs. The agents tend to produce working code but the larger the scope the bigger the mess they tend to make. They will happily evolve toward a local maxima but leave world-destroying bugs lurking in the implementation. The other issue is that claude regularly ignores explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md or in prompts. It will "helpfully" decide to just start doing whatever it wants or reinterpret instructions completely differently than it did the last 100 times. It has nothing to do with losing control or trust. LLMs are not conscious. They have no executive function. They aren't even thinking. They're just models predicting the next word in the script. They are very useful tools but that's all they are: tools.

TheRoque 4mo ago

What's the standard for a "battle station" interface to manage agents for programming (using isolation with maybe git work tree and ideally VMS ?) I found this one: do you guys know something else ?

0xbadcafebee 4mo ago

The reliance on context to drive correct actions just doesn't work well. I am constantly wrestling with AI agents that do not do what you tell them. Every AI agent out there seems to suck in this regard, leaving it up to the user to build in their own guardrails. I have a bad feeling that nobody is working on an improved solution.

coffeefirst 4mo ago
I’ve seen no reason to believe it’s even possible to solve this. The worst thing about LLMs is they can pass the Turing test, leading people to believe they have an Asimov style robot instead of a very cool statistical model. It feels like they should be able to follow instructions or keep instructions from content separate, but that’s not what’s happening.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
  When the you send a prompt and the AI wants to run a tool, it should be outputting a structured output which the AI agent can scan, find a tool call, and run that tool call. But how does the AI know the "right" way to call the tool, right args, etc? You're supposed to tell it once at the beginning of the context... but it can forget that. So really, your tool-specific rules should be passed to the AI either with your follow-up prompt, or in response to the request to issue a tool call, so the AI can validate what it will compose the tool call as, right as it's making the call. This means the agent should keep track of tool-specific rules, and reinforce them to the AI. Yes this will spend a few more tokens per call, but it will probably improve the outcomes somewhat. In addition to this, we should probably be abstracting the tool calls more. Rather than let the AI run a Bash one-liner which includes writing files to `/tmp/foo.txt`, we should have the AI output even more structured tool calls, liike `make_temp_file AS BAR`, and have it then call another tool referencing $BAR (`some_other_tool -tmpfile $BAR`). This way there is less to go wrong because it's not getting in the weeds doing shell scripting while it's trying to do something more important (diagnosing an issue). I think this will require additional training by the AI companies. Which is why we need to define these kind of standards now, so 6-12 months from now, we will have AI that actually support these higher level abstractions. You then customize your abstraction, and the AI doesn't have to know anything about how it works on your box. It would greatly reduce the complexity required for AIs to do agentic work.

isodev 4mo ago

This was very difficult to read. We really need to snap out of letting LLMs write posts. Even if there is some added value in this post, the feeling of chewing sand is just distracting and unnecessary.

crassus_ed 4mo ago
Agreed. I don't get how this article has almost 400 points.. There must be bots upvoting this slop..

blululu 4mo ago

The author’s claim that Claude is a multiplier for skill is probably true for now but it also feels like cope inspired by usability issues with Claude. The advice is all good, but none of it is especially clever or impressive or hard to grasp. The multiplier just comes from the fact that anthropic hadn’t taken this essay and several similar ones and incorporated their feedback into the product. This is a pretty shallow most of expertise that anthropic ought to automate in a week.

yunwal 4mo ago
My complaint with anthropic is actually the opposite. They seem too focused on building this suite of products (because they want lock-in), but they can’t even get the availability and speed on their models in an acceptable state. It really does seem like they’re falling behind google and OpenAI at the moment.

mindwok 4mo ago

How many times can I read the same shallow guidance written by AI on using a coding agent? Good god when will it stop

smallnix 4mo ago
You took the time to write out this comment. To the benefit of those who read it, please expand upon where the article is shallow and what content you miss.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- jmull 4mo ago
  The critique seems perfectly clear to me: The post has no value. There's nothing to salvage, no improvements to be made. It would be best if it simply did not exist. The poster probably hopes (as many of us do) that people will absorb the sentiment and post less of this junk in the future.
hootz 4mo ago
Can't wait to learn more about how to vendor-lock-in myself really hard into not being able to code without the help of a specific corporation!
- nomel 4mo ago
  For most people, CC is cheaper tokens for a SOTA model. What agentic platform would you recommend for those with API access (including other models)?
  - trollbridge 4mo ago
    Most people would do fine with DeepSeek (4, Pro) and OpenCode. Much cheaper too.
  - hootz 4mo ago

onebluecloud 4mo ago

[flagged]

willismonroe 4mo ago

I'm stuck on the usage "mulle times a week" which shows up twice in the context of the Claude team editing or contributing to a CLAUDE.md file. Is this an AI-generated artifact?

randusername 4mo ago
That got me too. It's not there anymore. Could be a simple typo, but I my mind jumped to `s/tip//g` which is kinda interesting
- arowthway 4mo ago
  I think you're right, more evidence: "11. s From the Anthropic Team", "Boris’s single most-repeated ."

EGreg 4mo ago

Best Claude Code daily-driver guide I’ve read. Though I’ve only read two. The “let Claude write rules for itself” CLAUDE.md pattern is the highest-ROI habit in there. Buth here’s the thing. The assumption underneath: this works when Claude mostly follows CLAUDE.md. Anthropic’s own engineering post from May 25 (https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude) reports their telemetry shows ~93% of permission prompts get clicked through and ~17% of dangerous actions slip past the auto-mode filter. Their conclusion: environment-layer containment first, then model-layer steering. CLAUDE.md is the right configuration layer but it is not a containment layer. Worth thinking about whether your worst case is a lost afternoon or a lost database and all backups deleted, too: https://safebots.ai/compromise.html https://safebots.ai/compromise.html But the more important point are the costs. People are starting to realize just how costly it can be to run agents without precomputing and caching: https://safebots.ai/costs.html https://safebots.ai/costs.html and self-orchestrating agents can go up to 1000x: https://safebots.ai/kimi.html https://safebots.ai/kimi.html

btbuildem 4mo ago

In my CLAUDE.md I have: - corporal threats of harm directly against Claude - threats of prison for the entire board of directors of Anthropic - explanation how every time it goes off the rails / makes mistakes, it gives more evidence to a class action lawsuit against Anthropic Especially the latter two seem to have improved its "behaviour" to be more "careful" and "deliberate"

hootz 4mo ago
Fix the CSS div alignment issue, make no mistakes or Dario Amodei will die instantly.
- henry2023 4mo ago
  Claude: Oh shit this is serious I need to step up and center the div with perfect precision … (45k tokens later) … style="margin: 0 auto”
- iammrpayments 4mo ago
  I sent this to claude and it rewrote the entire react codebase using CSS only
new_account_101 4mo ago
[dead]
psadauskas 4mo ago
I am nothing but polite with my agents. I always ask, say "please" and "thank you", and never swear at it or call it names. I'm hoping that when the robot apocalypse happens, they'll let me stay in the breeding harem, or worst case let me live a few extra minutes.
- smazga 4mo ago
  I am, too, and it got me thinking... why? And I realized that I've tried to be polite in all my interactions my whole life and I'm not going to practice being terse and commanding for a few pennies worth of tokens. Apocalyptic safety is just a bonus.

sourcecodeplz 4mo ago

I tried both Claude Code and OpenCode with deepseek flash api. claude code eats more tokens for the same task (but only tested it for an hour).

danielpardo 4mo ago

There are some system prompts for making Claude Code a tool to the human, not the human a tool to Claude. With this i mean there are some system prompts that make Claude very concerned about your autonomy. I think in the future this type of system prompt will be embeded to force people to think a little.

mil22 4mo ago

We really need some consolidation around commands, skills, subagents, and plugins. For example, if you want to, say, review code, you have five options now: - Write a .claude/commands/review.md. Simple but deprecated. - Use a /code-review skill, either one you install or one you just write yourself (it's just Markdown, after all). - Use the /pr-review subagent. Also just Markdown, but it runs "in the background" and "in parallel", so it must be better, I guess. - Install the /code-review plugin. This just installs the skills and subagents above. - Simply ask Claude to review the code. Probably works almost as well as the above in most situations. They are all just variations of "insert a canned prompt", varying only along the dimensions of (a) how and where the prompt is installed and from where it is sourced, and (b) which context or contexts the prompt runs in. There's not much advice here about which option is best, and no clear best practices seem to have emerged yet either. Personally, I find just asking Claude to review the code works well enough. Some of the advice here is also off. For example: "Install a language server plugin. Type errors and unused imports caught after every edit. Highest-impact plugin you can install." I work mostly with Rust, Python, and Dart, and followed similar advice, installing LSPs for all three in both Claude Code and Codex. Two months later, after heavy development in all three languages and hundreds of sessions - and frequently running out of RAM due to all the Rust analyzer, Dart analysis server, and Ty LSP servers the harnesses were spinning up - I checked the session logs to see how often the agents were actually invoking the LSP tools. The answer was they had invoked them literally once the entire time. I uninstalled all my LSPs and haven't looked back. The agents do just fine using ripgrep and calling cargo clippy, dart analyze, ty check, etc. themselves.

para_parolu 4mo ago
I just consider this temp phase because models are dumb and harnesses are not yet there. When I need code review I should just say “review it”. Model should figure out what plugins, skills, etc. to use.
- sheept 4mo ago
  Why does it need plugins/skills for a code review? Claude will just "review it" if you ask it to, and if you have particular preferences, they can go in CLAUDE.md

dangus 4mo ago

I’m so done reading articles like this. Beyond the issue of AI serfdom, I just don’t want so much of my workflow to depend on “some other company.” This whole setup is basically setting you up to have all your projects in a Claude SaaS lock-in. I also think if AI was actually smart it wouldn’t need so much handholding. I don’t want to spend my time developing skills and writing markdown files to try to get this dumb thing to write code for me. Why isn’t the AI reading the codebase and understanding what to do? Because it’s artificial, that’s why.

sergiotapia 4mo ago

I don't know how you guys still use anthropic models and Claude Code. It's so unbearably slow. Yesterday I was on screenshare with a coworker that still uses claude and I was shocked how much time was spent just waiting for tokens to generate. Do yourself a favor and try Codex. Then do yourself an even bigger favor and try composer 2.5 from Cursor. It's night and day difference. You don't even have time to get distracted, you stay in the zone.

k_plankenhorn 4mo ago

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jb3689 4mo ago

Sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the room for not wanting to have to usher the LLM through phase by phase. Every time I need to choose the next skill or cat the next error is just a waste of my time that could be spent doing things that actually need my attention like making business tradeoffs.

ale 4mo ago

This is just so much fluff. All the focus on "orchestrating" is ultimately accidental complexity.

nunez 4mo ago

100% AI generated according to Pangram.

mrbonner 4mo ago

I really appreciate the documentation. But, it appears to me that this is how I also use Claude daily and I thought I am just using it as a coding agent. The intro however sounds like a recipe to use Claude for everything else beyond a coding agent. Also, this stuff feels like alchemy to me . I bet some of you have the same feeling.

del-catta 4mo ago

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rrosen326 4mo ago

VS Code - how much of this can you NOT do with VS COde. For instance, even /rename doesn't work in VS Code. I guess I can try all the recommended commands, but I'm skeptical. Or, conversely, is best practice just to use Claude on the command line, even if I have VS Code as my editor? I think the VS Code integration with Claude is pretty great, but just the /rename issue shows that it is limited.

mdav75 4mo ago

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ath3nd 4mo ago

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victor106 4mo ago

I have an application that has /Frontend /API /ETL /DatabaseScripts Whats the best way to organize this so Claude Code can work efficiently?

esafak 4mo ago
A monorepo? Just point your agent at its root. What is the problem?

amazingman 4mo ago

Skills are just very poorly defined workflows.

cli-market 4mo ago

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4b11b4 4mo ago

Haven't used Claude in a month. Haven't desired to once either. In that time I once asked Claude to review some shit but it was such over verbose garbage I wondered how I tolerated it for that long. On top of it, CC is garbage

zuogl 4mo ago

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zane_shu 4mo ago

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xms17189 4mo ago

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helloansh 4mo ago

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msephton 4mo ago

Lots of missing words in this? eg. 11.

max_fs_dev 4mo ago

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implexa_founder 4mo ago

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terekhindc 4mo ago

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hipvlady 4mo ago

Great review. If you use this program every day, there is one thing you should know. CLAUDE.md is doing a lot of the most important work here, and it's the most fragile piece of the stack. A rule like "always re-read X before editing" is written as a piece of prose, and prose is subject to context. It's either one compaction or one subagent that appears from quietly disappearing, and there's no warning when this happens. The subagent case is the clear one: a subagent gets a new window, doesn't have the parent's CLAUDE.md discipline, and acts on the assumption that the rule was meant to stop something. The only thing that can reliably enforce the rules is settings.json permissions.deny, which the runtime checks before the model picks a tool. This means that you can't use cat or grep to bypass it. Everything left in prose is a strong default, not a guarantee. It's good to know which of your rules are which.

kcarriedo 3mo ago

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