These Claude Workflows Turn Claude Code Into A Whole OS

Imagine you're a medieval king. You've got a whole kingdom to run, but you'd rather do absolutely nothing while other people handle it for you. The problem is you can't because your staff are used to being spoon-fed. What you really need instead is a system that runs the entire kingdom on its own, and that is exactly what Claude Code has become. Ever since Anthropic has been shipping updates, it stopped being just a coding agent and turned into a full operating system, one that coordinates everything on your machine. But dynamic workflows are what actually... tie it all together. So before our king hands his whole kingdom to an agent, let's see how this thing actually works. ever since anthropic started shipping new ways for us to waste tokens which is really just their excuse to make more money off claude code it's become way more than just a coding agent it's basically a full operating system now just like how an operating system forms the foundation of every task and coordinates what you do on your machine claude code now plays that same role it coordinates and controls everything you do on it but before we dive into how dynamic workflows complete this system you need to know about the other components the only difference between a computer And just like a real OS, it's made up of multiple parts. Each one is important enough that the system isn't complete without it. In an OS, the kernel is the most important layer and forms the core and controls all operations. The equivalent in Cloud Code is the cloud.md file and your context files. We already made a complete video talking about how to structure your Claude.md file so that your agent performs at its best. That matters here, because the kernel is the driving program of your whole agent. If it isn't set up properly, the agent can't figure out what your project actually wants. And the other parts fall apart with it, kind of like how your whole life falls apart when you get married. Then there are the drivers, the pieces that let the system interact with external devices. The equivalent in Claude code is MCP. So whenever Claude needs an external tool, it reaches for it through MCP. MCP and calls that tool to do the job. After that come the everyday programs, which in Claude Code are the skills and other commands. These hold structured instructions for repeatable tasks and you can invoke them whenever you need them. Every OS also needs a scheduler or cron job that runs a specific task at a scheduled time. In the same way Claude Code recently added loops and routines, these are basically its cron jobs and they remove the need for you to monitor it through a task. They automate the repetitive work you would otherwise do by hand. So even if your system goes off, the tasks keep running on their own. So you can sleep peacefully knowing that your B2B SaaS application that literally no one is using is being looked after. And last but most importantly, there's the one piece that ties all of them together into a complete operating system. That piece is the dynamic workflow, the new feature that shipped with Opus 4.8. You might already know that Cloud Code has dynamic workflows. Basically, they're another attempt by Anthropic at simplifying long-running tasks. They work as repeatable instructions that spawn multiple to perform the task they're designed for. So how is it different from the other architectures you already have? To compare them, the first and simplest one is skills. Skills are repeatable instructions for tasks that need guided steps. But a skill is spawned by one agent and that same agent reads the instructions from it. It just guides the agent to do a task it already knows in a better way and doesn't help with long-running tasks. It's just one agent doing the whole thing. Then there is the goal command. It iterates toward a predefined end goal and the agent loops until the end condition is reached. This was an exceptional attempt at making long-running tasks better. We've been using it a lot in our own workflows ever since it was released. Both goal and workflow can coordinate multiple agents, but they're different. The core thing that separates them is determinism. Goal is non-deterministic, meaning the system decides what to do next. A workflow is deterministic, and the code decides exactly what happens. You create your first workflow just by using the keyword workflow. From that word in your prompt, Claude identifies the dynamic workflow needed for the task but this is a word we use all the time in prompts so you might think it would trigger every time it won't though unless the prompt actually expresses the intention to create one this is where workflows are actually different instead of the usual markdown that others use it creates a javascript code it lives inside the workflow directory within the dot claude folder and it uses that entire script to control the whole thing so instead of your plan living in the context window that plan is written down in code defining how the sub agents will work step by step It defines strict schemas, which are basically forms for the subagents, so that they give the output in a strict format. Each agent is called with the prompt and the form it has to satisfy. It keeps working until the output matches that schema, then returns its findings. You invoke them with the slash command with the workflow name. Then you can hand it the plan you want to stress test. It runs in the background, so you can carry on with your own work, give it another prompt, so that your project manager feels proud about your AI productivity for once. To check the progress, you just run the work. workflow command. There you can see every stage of each workflow and all the models each agent has invoked and see how many tokens each task has burnt through. And if your session ends while a workflow is running, you don't have to worry about losing progress. It persists after you run the resume command. Each workflow keeps its own ID. And when you resume, it pulls all the cached agent work back from memory and picks up where it left off. Unlike my grandma, it doesn't just forget to pay the Claude AI bill and actually remembers what it needs to do. One thing to note before you use a workflow. Since this is in research preview, dynamic workflows consume way more tokens than a typical Claude code session. That's because they use multiple sub-agents under the hood and each one runs in its own separate context window. You need to carefully consider when you actually need them or else you'll run out of your $200 plan in a few hours. There are a few key metrics that tell you whether a workflow is the best option. The first is that the task can be split into independent units. If the agents depend on each other's work, they end up up waiting around and there's no point spawning a workflow because you lose all the parallelism this is why if the tasks are less dependent on one another you get better parallelism and faster results which your startup should learn from as it's still dependent on your parents money and basement to survive the next reason to use dynamic workflows is if the task needs more than a single context window to run and needs to be divided into chunks workflows use multiple sub-agents each with its own context window so the task should be big enough to actually need those separate windows. Otherwise, you'll just be wasting time and tokens. Each sub-agent runs in its own fresh context and returns only the result. The rest of its reasoning stays in the code file and never enters the main context window unless you need it. The next reason is that the task is worth verifying. Use a workflow when a wrong answer is expensive enough that it needs cross-verification before you move forward. That includes things like security findings, bug claims, and migrations, but that verification costs extra agents which burn tokens and time. So make sure task is actually worth it and you're not just spawning five agents because you recently heard an ai tech ceo say that more tokens equals more money the last reason is that your task is deterministic a workflow uses code to call agents in a fixed structure so if the task is deterministic go for it if the task is not deterministic and needs an agent to evaluate what the next task would be at the runtime workflows are not for that so when you choose between workflow and goal think about the shape of the task a task can be wide or deep. Wide means it can be broken into many subtasks that can run at the same time. Deep means one task at a time, going step by step further into it. A workflow is wide, so instead of going deeper, it just calls the agents and lets them iterate. For deep tasks, the goal command takes one task at a time and does not run things in parallel the way workflows do. Only reach for a workflow once the task genuinely fits, so you don't waste tokens. Claude Code already ships with a built-in dynamic workflow called Deep Research. It's basically the multi-step research pipeline we used to build by hand with multiple context files and Claude.md. Now it's just a workflow you can invoke from any project. This research forms a key part of the whole OS you build. It makes sure the information sources behind that OS are trustworthy, so your mom can't feed you fake info from her boomer Facebook group and then scold you when you fact check her. It runs in five parts and each one leads into the next. First, it's for information then fetches the details from the sources it finds after that comes adversarial verification to cross-validate the claims and it synthesizes whatever survives into one final document you can watch it work from the workflows command where each sub-agent inherits its tools from the parent and it's really token intensive so it can burn through your whole limit in no time this one run took a million tokens on a small topic aside from multi-step research you can build other research workflows that become part of your research system one we may for ourselves researches competitors checks how they're performing and finds the competitive edge they have this is an important piece if you're a product builder you need to know how your competitors are performing in the market so that you can build something better this one is split into four phases like the research workflow and once it finishes it reports back the findings our run used 679 000 tokens and 34 agents and wrote a full markdown report with its findings it also improves itself as it goes when it hits an issue it applies a So the next time you run it, it doesn't run into the same issues it did the first time. The report comes with clearly defined comparison metrics and all of its findings. So when you build your product, you can use it as a source for analyzing the market before launching it. Also, if you are enjoying our content, consider pressing the hype button because it helps us create more content like this and reach out to more people. Every operating system needs its kernel, its drivers and the pieces that make it complete. Together, they let it run without your input. One example of such a system is a second brain. setup this is definitely useful if your first one like ours got completely from sitting unused ever since our devices got blessed with llms the kernel of this second brain becomes your claude.md which holds the information on how to navigate the whole system the everyday programs the repeatable things are your skills they carry the instructions for the tasks you do over and over here is the best way to set one up when you are deep in a long session and realize this is something you will do often just ask claude to combine the learnings from that session into a skill the memory of this os is all the files you create and maintain in your vault. They record what you do and how you do it. That means it knows more about you than you do yourself and they give Claude context on everything you are working on. We often need the second brain to reach external sources so we've configured the Google Calendar and Notion MCPs. That way it can access the project files in Notion and sync the data, read the schedule on the calendar and create and update entries so that it can fit some touching grass in between your already busy schedule. We've documented the exact formats it should follow in the Claude.md file and the most important part is creating the workflows for your setup. These let you parallelize your repeatable tasks and hand them to sub-agents. The morning brief workflow we built spins up sub-agents to gather information across multiple sources and returns a brief to start our day. Once all this is set up, you just give it a prompt. It loads the right skill and context, creates the files in the right places, and connects the information to the relevant parts on its own. If you've been using the second brain for a while, you should build an audit workflow. It checks for broken links and exposes every issue in the setup and reports them back from there you can run the fixes and keep your second brain in top shape but knowing what kind of man you are you'll also be paying for its therapy sessions by next week Similar to how you can set up a whole operating system for non-coding projects, you can do the same for your coding projects as well. You set up your cloud.md as the kernel and put all the project information inside it. You configure the agents for your project which act as your everyday programs. You also set up hooks for different cases, like formatting a file after an agent finishes editing it, so that between the f***ing mess, you call your relationship and your code, at least one thing is organized. You create skills for different tasks, like adding a new endpoint. follows the exact schema you want, and you can create workflows for things like reviewing changes before shipping, migrating the codebase or the database, and running end-to-end tests to confirm the whole app works. Instead of you waking up by your manager calling at 2am that your prod is down again, the context for this OS becomes the files in your docs folder and the code itself. Workflows are exceptionally helpful for project migrations. You can build one that converts your whole project from one library to another and let the individual agents handle the conversion. tested this before and without a workflow it took more than an hour but with a workflow it took just 21 minutes so the time saved with workflows can go towards more important things like scrolling through Dario's inappropriate deep fakes this is how our operating system extends into coding use cases so when you are building projects you don't have to handle everything by hand you let the operating system do it for you if you want to found the next big AI B2B SaaS company but don't know where to start you should be an AI labs pro that's where you'll find the workflows used in this video along with all the other resources guides and goodies we've put together you'll also get to meet a bunch of like-minded nerds including our team the links in the description and you can check that out that brings us to the end of this video if you'd like to support the channel and help us keep making videos like this you can do so by using the super thanks button below as always thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one

My Claude Code setup just turned Claude Code into a full operating system that runs your entire project for you. This Claude Code tutorial breaks down dynamic workflows, the new feature shipped with Opus 4.8, plus Claude Code tips Boris Cherny would approve of, so you can hand off long-running work and stop babysitting your agent.

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What we cover in this video:

The Claude Code Operating System

- How Claude Code became a full OS, not just a coding agent
- claude.md as the kernel that drives your whole setup
- MCP as the drivers that connect external tools
- Skills and commands as the everyday programs for repeatable tasks
- Loops and routines as the scheduler that runs work on its own

Dynamic Workflows (the /workflow feature)

- What dynamic workflows are and how the claude code workflow system actually works
- Why workflows are deterministic and the goal command is not
- How a claude code agentic workflow spawns multiple sub-agents in parallel
- Why it writes a JavaScript script in the .claude folder instead of plain markdown
- Strict schemas so each agent returns structured, accurate output
- Running workflows in the background and resuming them with the workflow ID
- A claude code github workflow style setup for reviewing changes before you ship

When To Use Workflows vs Goal

- How to tell wide tasks from deep tasks
- Splitting work into independent units for real parallelism
- When a task is big enough to need separate context windows
- When a result is worth cross-verifying (security findings, bugs, migrations)
- Token cost reality on the $200 plan, so you don't burn your limit

Deep Research and Multi-Agent Systems

- The built-in Deep Research workflow and its five phases
- A competitor research workflow using 34 sub-agents
- How a multi-agent setup keeps reasoning out of your main context window

Building a Second Brain

- claude.md as the kernel of your second brain
- Skills, vault memory, Google Calendar and Notion MCPs
- A morning brief workflow and an audit workflow to keep it healthy

Code Use Cases

- Hooks, agents, and skills for real coding projects
- A migration workflow that cut an hour of work down to 21 minutes

Whether you are looking for how to use Claude Code, want claude code tips for beginners, or a claude code full course style breakdown, this video gives you the agentic workflow patterns to make AI build and run things for you. New to the tool? This works as a claude code for beginners starting point, and you can pair it with the free tier if you want to try Claude Code for free before going deeper.

More for builders:

- How to use Claude Code for free on the free tier before upgrading
- claude code skills you can reuse across every project
- Treat this as a mini claude code course you can revisit as the tooling evolves

00:00 Intro
00:34 The Previous Setup
02:51 Workflows
05:26 When to Use Workflows
07:47 Research
09:35 Second Brain
11:28 Code Use Case

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