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How I use every Claude Code feature

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Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing crazy about it, judging by how much CPU and memory it uses. Now, if it managed to grow features without bringing my M4 Mac with 64GB of ram to a crawl... that's be magic .

My m1 macbook pro works fine with +10 claude code sessions open at the same time (iTerm2). Are you using a terminal with a memory leak perhaps?

How are you managing 10 parallel agents??

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#92

I use claude code every day, and havent had a chance to dig super deep into skills, but even though ive read a lot of people describe them and say they're the best thing so far, I still dont get them. Theyre things the agent chooses to call right? They have different permissions? is it a tool call with different permissions and more context? I have yet to see a single post give an actual real-world concrete example o…

apparently I missed Simon Willison's article, this at least somewhat explains them: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/ So if youre building your own agent, this would be a directory of markdown documents with headers that you tell the agent to scan so that its aware of them, and then if it thinks they could be useful it can choose to read all the instructions into its context? Is it any more than th…

It also looks a lot like a tool that has a description mentioning it has a more detailed MD file the LLM can read for instructions on complex workflows, doesn’t it? MCP has the concept of resources for this sort of thing. I don’t see any difference between calling a tool and calling a CLI otherwise.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#93
post #41

Just my curiosity: Why are you producing so much code? Is it because it is now possible to do so with AI, or because you have a genuine need (solid business usecase) that requires a lot of code?

>> Why are you producing so much code? This is basically a "thinking tax". If you don't want to think and offload it to llm they burn through a lot of tokens to implement in a non-efficient way something you could often do in 10 lines if you though about it for a few minutes.

I’ve just implemented a proof of concept that involved an API, a MCP server, an Authorization Server, a React frontend, token validation and proof of possession on the client, a CIBA flow for authentication… took a week , and I don’t even know the technologies used very well, it was all TypeScript but I work on JVM languages normally. This was a one off for a customer and I was able to show a fairly complex workflow end to end and what each part involves. I let the LLM write most of it but I understand every line and did have to make manual adjustments (though to be honest, I could easily explain to the LLM what I needed changed and given my experience it would eventually get there.

If you tell me I didn’t really need a LLM to be able to do all that in a week and just some thought and 10 lines of code would do, I suspect you are not really familiar with the latest developments in AI and just vastly underestimates the capabilities they have to do tricky stuff.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#94
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it would be a good idea to use a symlink instead?

I'm still not 100% sure I understand what a symlink in a git repository actually does, especially across different operating systems. Maybe it's fine? Anthropic say "put @AGENTS.md in your CLAUDE.md" file and my own experiments confirmed that this dumps the content into the system prompt in the same way as if you had copied it to CLAUDE.md manually, so I'm happy with that solution - at least until Anthropic give in a…

It just creates the same symlink on any other checkout. (On Linux/macOS at least, Windows I believe requires local settings changes.)

Only sane (guaranteed portable) option is for it to be a relative symlink to another file within the same repo, of course. i.e. CLAUDE.md would be -> 'AGENTS.md', not '/home/simonw/projects/pelicans-on-bicycles/AGENTS.md' or whatever.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#95

I use claude code every day, and havent had a chance to dig super deep into skills, but even though ive read a lot of people describe them and say they're the best thing so far, I still dont get them. Theyre things the agent chooses to call right? They have different permissions? is it a tool call with different permissions and more context? I have yet to see a single post give an actual real-world concrete example o…

The prerequisite thought here is that you're using CC to invoke CLI tools.

So now you need to get CC to understand _how_ to do that for various tools in a way that's context efficient, because otherwise you're relying on either potentially outdated knowledge that Claude has built in (leading to errors b/c CC doesn't know about recent versions) or chucking the entirety of a man page into your default context (inefficent).

What the Skill files do is then separate the when from the how.

Consider the git cli.

The skill file has a couple of sentences on when to use the git cli and then a much longer section on how it's supposed to be used, and the "how" section isn't loaded until you actually need it.

I've got skills for stuff like invoking the native screenshot CLI tool on the Mac, for calling a custom shell script that uses the github API to download and pull in screenshots from issues (b/c the cli doesn't know how to do this), for accessing separate APIs for data, etc.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#97

> If you’re not already using a CLI-based agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI, you probably should be. Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why? I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____." I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying…

Claude is just better at coding than cursor.

Really, the interface isn't a meaningful part of it. I also like cmd-L, but claude just does better at writing code.

...also, it's nice that Anthropic is just focusing on making cool stuff (like skills), while the folk from cursor are... I dunno. Whatever it is they're doing with cursor 2.0 :shrug:

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#98

I use claude code every day, and havent had a chance to dig super deep into skills, but even though ive read a lot of people describe them and say they're the best thing so far, I still dont get them. Theyre things the agent chooses to call right? They have different permissions? is it a tool call with different permissions and more context? I have yet to see a single post give an actual real-world concrete example o…

The prerequisite thought here is that you're using CC to invoke CLI tools. So now you need to get CC to understand _how_ to do that for various tools in a way that's context efficient, because otherwise you're relying on either potentially outdated knowledge that Claude has built in (leading to errors b/c CC doesn't know about recent versions) or chucking the entirety of a man page into your default context (ineffice…

After CC used that skill and it is now in the context, how do you get rid of it later when you don’t need the skill anymore and don’t want to have your context stuffed with useless skill descriptions?

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#99

> If you’re not already using a CLI-based agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI, you probably should be. Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why? I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____." I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying…

Claude is able to detect the lines of code selected in vscode anyway

As-is Gemini CLI and Codex. I run my CLIs in VSC and only using it as a file browser.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#100
post #60

"All my stateless tools (like Jira, AWS, GitHub) have been migrated to simple CLIs." - How do you get Jira on the CLI?

There's an Atlasian cli with Jira support https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/acli/reference/command...

Cloud only. My employer is still on an ancient data center version. But you can easily write a cli that wraps the REST API.
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