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0 pointsmaxkfranz2mo ago0 comments

> Once you’ve got Claude Code set up, you can point it at your codebase, have it learn your conventions, pull in best practices, and refine everything until it’s basically operating like a super-powered teammate. The real unlock is building a solid set of reusable “skills” plus a few agents for the stuff you do all the time.

I agree with this, but I haven't needed to use any advanced features to get good results. I think the simple approach gets you most of the benefits. Broadly, I just have markdown files in the repo written for a human dev audience that the agent can also use.

Basically:

- README.md with a quick start section for devs, descriptions of all build targets and tests, etc. Normal stuff.

- AGENTS.md (only file that's not written for people specifically) that just describes the overall directory structure and has a short step of instructions for the agent: (1) Always read the readme before you start. (2) Always read the relevant design docs before you start. (3) Always run the linter, a build, and tests whenever you make code changes.

- docs/*.md that contain design docs, architecture docs, and user stories, just text. It's important to have these resources anyway, agent or no.

As with human devs, the better the docs/requirements the better the results.

0 comments

vidarh2mo ago

I'd really encourage you to try using agents for tasks that are repeatable and/or wordy but where most of the words are not relevant for ongoing understanding.

It's a tiny step further, and sub-agents provide a massive benefit the moment you're ready to trust the model even a little bit (relax permissions to not have it prompt you for every little thing; review before committing rather than on every file edit) because they limit what goes into the top level context, and can let the model work unassisted for far longer. I now regularly have it run for hours at a time without stopping.

Running and acting on output from the linter is absolutely an example of that which matters even for much shorter runs.

There's no reason to have all the lint output "polluting" the top level context, nor to have the steps the agent needs to take to fix linter issues that can't be auto-fixed by the linter itself. The top level agent should only need to care about whether the linter run passed or failed (and should know it needs to re-run and possibly investigate if it fails).

Just type /agents, select "Create new agent" and describe a task you often do, and then forget about it (or ask Claude to make changes to it for you)

maxkfranzOP2mo ago

That's a great point. There are a lot of things you can do to optimise things, and your suggestion is one of the lower hanging fruits.

I was trying to get across the point that today you can get a lot of benefit from minimal setup, even one that's vendor-agnostic. (The steps I outlined work for Codex out of the box, too.)

You're right to point out that the more you refine things, the more you'll get out of the tools. It used to be that you had to do a lot of refinements to start getting good results at all. Now, you can get a lot out of even a basic setup like I outlined, which is great for people who are new users -- or people who tried it before and weren't that impressed but are now giving it another try.

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