Tips for Claude Code

Must Read or Watch

• Claude Code & the evolution of agentic coding — Boris Cherny, Anthropic
• A conversation on Claude Code — Boris Cherny, Anthropic
• Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding — Boris Cherny, Anthropic

Use Every Feature

use every feature of claude code, not doing so is leaving power on the table.

• use dictation to give the model more context, every word helps narrow down the task to what you where expecting
• use the plan mode
• use ctrl+ z exit the claude code to terminal and then resume with fg
  • its so much better than the ! bash command for running commands WITHOUT adding them to the context.
• use the ! bash command to run commands that you want added to the context
  • running --help on a tool is a great way to get the model to understand the tool.
• use the memory
• use the web search
  • i've been linking to the readme of the repo i'm using at the time to load it into the context.
• using up arrow to repeat commands
• add commands to .claude/commands to make them available in the future and with $ARGUMENTS to pass arguments to the command

Don't get distracted

• if you have an idea how to improve something, create an issue to remember it, but don't get distracted by it in the moment.

Other Tips

• Think about how you manage context, the idea maybe already now that the best communicator -> the best coder. The New Code — Sean Grove, OpenAI
• so writing document specifications, is may be even more important than writing code.
  • give a look at this these requirements for a project, which really embraced this idea. I used clade to translate from Japanese to English: Requirements for a Project
• Use Pictures
  • Claude Code can use pictures, so if you have a picture of the code you want to change, you can use that to give it more context.
  • give claude access to output of what running the code does so it can create feedback loop to really improve.
    • tests are great for this, but you can also use screenshots or text of the output.
    • for any web app, you can use the puppeteer to take screenshots of the output and use that as context.