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Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

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Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#181

Post by jmalicki »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #170
lanthissa wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not though if you're working in a massive codebase or on a distributed system that has many interconnected parts. skills that teach the agent how to pipe data, build requests, trace them through a system and datasources, then update code based on those results are a step function improvement in development. ai has fundamentally changed how productive i am working on a 10m line codebase, and i'd guess less than 5%…

But... plain Claude does that. At least for my codebase, which is nowhere close to your 10m line. But we do processing on lots of data (~100TB) and Claude definitely builds one-off tools and scripts to analyze it, which works pretty great in my experience. What sort of skills are you referring to?

If you build up and save some of those scripts, skills help Claude remember how and when to use them.

Skills are crazy useful to tell Claude how to debug your particular project, especially when you have a library of useful scripts for doing so.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#182

Post by endofreach »

cornholio wrote: post #176
dewey wrote: post #132

Building your AI agent "toolkit" is becoming the equivalent of the perfect "productivity" setup where you spend your time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos telling you how to be productive and creating habits and rituals...only to be overtaken by a person with a simple paper list of tasks that they work through. Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best…

Let me give you a counterexample. I'm working on a product for the national market, and i need to do all financial tasks, invoicing, submit to national fiscal databse etc. through a local accounting firm. So i integrate their API in the backend; this is a 100% custom API developed by this small european firm, with a few dozen restful enpoints supporting various accounting operations, and I need to use it programmatic…

What exactly does it do that a professional would charge you thousands for?

(I'm genuinely asking)

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#185

Post by jp57 »

dewey wrote: post #132

Building your AI agent "toolkit" is becoming the equivalent of the perfect "productivity" setup where you spend your time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos telling you how to be productive and creating habits and rituals...only to be overtaken by a person with a simple paper list of tasks that they work through. Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best…

This. At work I have described this phenomenon as the equivalent of tinkering with the margins and fonts in your word processor instead of just writing your paper.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#186

Post by FINDarkside »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #170
lanthissa wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not though if you're working in a massive codebase or on a distributed system that has many interconnected parts. skills that teach the agent how to pipe data, build requests, trace them through a system and datasources, then update code based on those results are a step function improvement in development. ai has fundamentally changed how productive i am working on a 10m line codebase, and i'd guess less than 5%…

But... plain Claude does that. At least for my codebase, which is nowhere close to your 10m line. But we do processing on lots of data (~100TB) and Claude definitely builds one-off tools and scripts to analyze it, which works pretty great in my experience. What sort of skills are you referring to?

I think people are looking at skills the wrong way. It's not like it gives it some kind of superpowers it couldn't do otherwise. Ideally you'll have Claude write the skills anyway. It's just a shortcut so you don't have to keep rewriting a prompt all over again and/or have Claude keep figuring out how to do the same thing repeatedly. You can save lots of time, tokens and manual guidance by having well thought skills. Some people use these to "larp" some kind of different job roles etc and I don't think that's productive use of skills unless the prompts are truly exceptional.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#188

Post by thbb123 »

obsidianbases1 wrote: post #135
dewey wrote: post #132

Building your AI agent "toolkit" is becoming the equivalent of the perfect "productivity" setup where you spend your time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos telling you how to be productive and creating habits and rituals...only to be overtaken by a person with a simple paper list of tasks that they work through. Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best…

Lots of money being made by luring people into this trap. The reality is that if you actually know what you want, and can communicate it well (where the productivity app can be helpful), then you can do a lot with AI. My experience is that most people don't actually know what they want. Or they don't understand what goes into what they want. Asking for a plan is a shortcut to gaining that understanding.

Or, as I like to put it: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to figure what is it I really want. And still, quite often, I think in terms of the programming language I'm used to and the library I'm familiar with.

So, to really create something new that I care about, LLMs don't help much.

They are still useful for plenty of other tasks.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#189

Post by mememememememo »

cornholio wrote: post #176
dewey wrote: post #132

Building your AI agent "toolkit" is becoming the equivalent of the perfect "productivity" setup where you spend your time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos telling you how to be productive and creating habits and rituals...only to be overtaken by a person with a simple paper list of tasks that they work through. Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best…

Let me give you a counterexample. I'm working on a product for the national market, and i need to do all financial tasks, invoicing, submit to national fiscal databse etc. through a local accounting firm. So i integrate their API in the backend; this is a 100% custom API developed by this small european firm, with a few dozen restful enpoints supporting various accounting operations, and I need to use it programmatic…

Your use is maybe more vanilla than you think. I think you are just getting shit done. Which is good.

Claude and an mcp and skill is plain to me. Writing your own agent connecting to LLMs to try to be better than Claude code, using Ralph loops and so on is the rabbit hole.

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