How I use Claude Code (Meta Staff Engineer Tips)

Well, hello there. How's it going everybody? Today we're gonna go over my 50 Cloud Code tips. I've been working with Cloud Code basically every day for about six months now and I feel like I've learned a ton of things and yes I am one of those engineers that are basically not writing code anymore. I'm still in Cloud Code like 12 hours a day actively pair programming with Cloud Code basically and reviewing a ton of code. I still read every single line of code. That's actually my biggest bottleneck right now, the reviewing of the code. But I thought it would be great to show you kind of the best tips that I've learned along the way. And these are kind of tips that I wish I knew when I was first getting started. We're going to start off with some foundation stuff like setting up, very quick setup stuff, a little bit about like Cloud.MD rules, like what you should put in, what you should think about, and kind of some of the advanced stuff for later. But without further ado, let's dive into 50 Cloud Code tips. I got my terminal here and I just have some slides behind to tell you guys what I'm doing. So here is the foundations that I mentioned. We're going to cover getting started, keyboard shortcuts, some essential like slash commands, and a little bit of a deep dive into the claw.md. So let's get started. All right. So for tip number one, you want to run claw code in your root directory of whatever project you're working on. So for example, I have this Pomodoro app. that I've been working on. So I'll type in Claude here. And that's essentially how you get started. And you really want to do this because later we'll talk about this. But if you have rule files or any kind of setup, the initial root directory is where Claude is going to zip up the context into that first token. So if you ever wonder why you had a bunch of tokens used, even though you just opened up Claude, this is probably the reason why. It's because Claude's getting your project ready. All right, so one of the first things that you want to do is run slash init like that. And what this does is Cloud will go and look at your code base and do an analysis of your code base and then create that initial cloud.md file in the .cloud directory of your code base. Now, there is like different directories that you could source from. Like you could have a global one or like this one. But yeah, at a high level, what this is doing right now is just looking at the code base. looking for the architecture, and then basically it's creating that claw.md. All right, so it just finished. It does take some time. And as you can see, it's kind of going and saying, oh, this is like a Next.js 15 app. It's like a portfolio site. But yeah, it's just going over high-level things about this particular project. And then you could just essentially hit yes to commit that to your dot claw. So this is really important for new projects. So I highly recommend you. to run it. All right. So the tip number two is that cloud.md file that we just created, it kind of runs on a hierarchy. So if you go to memory slash memory, you could kind of see right here that there is a check-in memory, which is the current root directory. And then there's a user memory. This is like your global one. So that's like in your tilde dot cloud slash cloud. So you could kind of choose between it, but it's really there so you can know what the core rule. that the Claude code is operating on right now. Looking at the Claude.md that Claude just created, this is a pretty good one to get started, right? It just has like. you don't want it to be too large. It's like very small, right? I think around 300 lines is about a decent place that you want to aim for. And to be honest, going larger is fine. But just remember that every time you increase that initial context window, you're going to use more tokens, first of all, but also the more bloat you have in your context, the less likely the AI will do exactly what you're trying to do. All right. So for structure and what you should be thinking about putting into your cloud.md. I just opened another project. This one is my anime Pomodoro. This is an iOS app. So I wanted to show you a little bit more examples. But basically, the things I like to put is like high level technical architecture and the requirements, you know, like what is the project like that's kind of important. And then you want to give it like some domain context, right? Like, oh, it's using Swift. UI and I probably would add high level architecture and like kind of the file path and things like that and just some of the high level design patterns like you'll see like all of that should go in here and then one of the important thing is kind of having your build flow like your validation flow and this is like kind of where by build and validation is. So you can see that I'll like build the Xcode and then build a project and make sure things compile. Just having this loop of validation is so amazing because the AI will just be able to self improve and keep going until it fixes itself. So like if you are ever in that situation where you just like ask cursor to do something or ask some AI code agent to do something and it just. doesn't work a lot of that gets resolved when you fix the validation and validation i think as a side tip is probably one of the most important topics that you should really think about when you're thinking about trying to build good ai agentic like coding systems or any workflows is really what is the validation loop because that will dramatically improve how good your ai will be All right, so let's go to some keyboard shortcuts. And the reason why I even have this entire section for this is because if you're going to be in cloud code all day, every day, like if you're an engineer, you're just going to be on this workhorse for quite a while. So you should learn how to actually use most useful hotkeys. And there's essentially shift tab toggle modes is pretty useful. And that's just like hitting shift and tab. And then you can see right here that we're switching from Accept Edits to Plan Mode. I actually use Plan Mode quite heavily. I think I use Plan Mode almost exclusively whenever I start a new feature. It's rare that I start in Edit Mode. I always just want to verify and double check that my assumptions about the codebase that I'm working on. and the direction that I'm trying to go with is the best option. I usually start in plan mode and spend a decent amount of time before I go to accept and just start execution. Escape interrupts. Let me just get something started here. Tell me a good way to plan a live activity for when I background the app. I'm going to let this go to show you guys what escaping. the interrupts is but you can see that Claude is like thinking here and it's like going through and doing things sometimes if especially during plan mode you want to kind of like look at this and look at the thinking and see if it's going off track if it is you just hit escape and then it interrupts now a lot of people might be like kind of like scared to interrupt it but you can just like hit up and then go right back to where you're doing or you could just interrupt it and tell it something else. The whole point is Cloud Code has a really good way of like deduping and entering prompts in a nice queue. It like, it logically knows what to do. So you don't have to be so scared to like enter more than one prompt and also like, escaping early and interrupting and changing course like it's actually recommended to do that tip number eight is if you ever had something like really big where you copy pasted something and you're like oh i don't want to delete everything a handy shortcut here is just double tap escape and it'll clear the input there's also a vim mode if you're into that but i use this all the time another thing is when you're on an empty input if you double tap escape you'll see that you can rewind to like a previous point and then restore that context point. This is kind of common with ClockCode, but a lot of the tools I feel like is really built to manage your context and context engineering. And then there's just like an agent that is wrapped around the orchestration. But a lot of the like slash commands and stuff that we'll be going over, I feel like it's really to manage that context window. All right, screenshots is obviously a pretty common thing to do. There's a lot of ways to do it. But you can essentially take a screenshot and then drag it over and just drop it in. And then obviously another good tip is to add context. This is a cool picture of the Clock Home mascot. Do something with it. I don't know. But yeah, so that's a really good example of like. taking a screenshot and bringing it over if you are doing any kind of ui work you'll definitely use this workflow i also highly recommend finding like a figma mcp or some form of mcp that works really good with the specific validation that you're trying to do all right moving on to essential commands and this is slash commands before i end on the keyboard shortcuts there's a lot more keyboard shortcuts things that i don't use all the time if you just go to like slash help you'll be able to see a bunch of them but The ones that I covered, I use all the time, every day. So definitely just memorize it. I think it would be really useful. Now, essential commands is like the slash commands that I think you should know about. There's way more slash commands, and you could make your own slash commands, but these are the ones that I think is useful. All right, so slash clear is basically a way to clear the context. Now, you could actually do this by just creating another instance of Claude, right? That's basically the same thing. But if you don't want to like do that, you could just clear the context. And this is really good if you want to start a new feature and you're completely done with the old task and you don't want the old context to blow up the new context and influence the new project that you're doing. All right. So I just loaded some stuff. Let's go into slash context. What this does is it will give you like a visual representation of the current context that Cloud Code is operating in. Now, why is this useful? So the main reason why this is useful is because it gives you an opportunity to reason about the context that Cloud Code is making assumptions on on your code base now i always say context is best served fresh and condensed and you really want to take a look at this from time to time if you ever felt like cloud code has regressed and like things are not working the way it is or your like cost and usage like bill is going up you really want to look at this and then see which are like the most biggest offenders right you just want to like audit it like mcps are one of those very common things that blows up your tokens i mean like look at all of this xcode related mcps and every time it runs it like i mean these are not a lot because i haven't been doing that much in this particular workflow but you could just imagine that once I start doing those iteration cycles, this usage will blow up. But yeah, so if you look at this and you're like, oh, this MCP is using so much, then you could remove it or just disable it for this directory. So slash context is something that you probably should not ignore. Again, I think Cloud Code, all of the tools is really there to manage a lot of the context and doing really good context engineering. So this is a good. a slash command right so in terms of compaction like if you use cloud code at all if you had a long session it will start auto compacting at some point all auto compaction does is it takes your current context window like context that you created and then it will just summarize it and then it does a pretty good job for my projects i usually just let the auto compaction work but if you really want to compact what you have right now you could just compact but i i rarely use this the only time i use this is if i want to save some version of my context into like my local like second brain if you haven't seen that video go and check it out but i have the second brain concept when i work on projects and that's where that goes so for slash models this is like very useful i think if you have unlimited tokens like if you're doing this at work for me i usually just defaulted to opus 4.5. But if you're very like cost sensitive and you know certain workflows work well in Sonnet or like Haiku, then you could just go and change that. Keeping it at default is fine too, but I would try to use Opus as much as possible. All right, so slash resume is really useful if you accidentally like lost your instance. Let's say you created another one and then you accidentally killed it or something like that, right? oh you killed the wrong one or something then when you go back into clock code you could do slash resume like so and then it'll give you kind of the old context and then you could like recover your context so that you don't lose the all the work that you did in building up that context window all right slash mcp is really about um showing the mcps that you have installed If I have to be honest, I try very, very hard to not use MCPs because I think they blow up your context window. So I only install ones that are needed for that very specific project. And I try to just leverage cloud code and write scripts and like these kind of things manually, like myself, to do the validations and things like that. But some projects, you just do need MCPs, like... this Xcode one you kind of need it and for other projects like my Next.js apps I have like a whole set of MCPs for that but just be careful with MCPs but it's a really fantastic way to teach Claude how to do certain things, especially with like third party software and things like that. You know, it's a protocol, right? Model context protocol. So it's basically used everywhere. But again, it's known to blow up your token usage and your context window. So just be careful. All right. So slash help is the last thing I'm going to teach you, you know, teach a man how to fish. So this like little wizard here will just teach you what they are and give you like descriptions of everything. So just go ahead and like try these out and just take a look and you know, explore. All right. So the next thing is around Git. So you could ask ClockCode to manage your Git. I think there's a bunch of like skills you could download to ClockCode to manage all your Git. And I think that's something that you should do. Like I write a lot of my summaries and test plans all using like. Cloud Code now, obviously I have my own templates that I wrote. So Cloud kind of sounds more like me and it's not too verbose and things like that. So I highly recommend you to use Git as a safety net. There is actually a rewind feature, like I think I told you, where you could restore the code and the conversation. But this is a little confusing to me. Like Git is just better. I use this as like a last resort if I didn't have Git. for a certain checkpoint so now that you know how to just navigate around cloud code and things like that and just kind of high level important like commands and things like that i think it's a good time to deep dive into the claw.md file i think for most people most users like 80 of users if you just have a really good cloud.md file for your project you could get really really far without learning like all the advanced stuff just having a really good rules file will save you a lot of headaches let's kind of dive a little bit deep into this okay so one of the most important things in the cloud.md files is first of all it's like it actually reads top to bottom and it keeps the priority from top to bottom. I think that's like a very small nuance. I'm pretty sure that's true. I think I read that somewhere. But yeah, so you want to go top to bottom as like important to least important. And you want to add things that are like never do something, but always do this. And they have like clear snippets of examples. I think it's really good. And I don't have that many on this particular project because it's stock Swift UI. But The context here is that you should really think about how unique is your project? How many things about your project is like homegrown and essentially like the AI may have never seen. Like remember, a lot of this code is like basically a lot of the AI like coding is basically just an accumulation of like the best code that the AI is trained on. So it might not know you're like super special. dsl language that you created or like some random archaic patterns that your company has and that's where you'll be like oh why is the ai never doing this so whenever you run into something like that you want to fix it manually and then you just update your claw.md rules so that it never does that mistake again think of it as like lint files kind of and then when you ask claw to update the rules you shouldn't ever do it manually, you should just go here into claw and say, hey, can you update that rule for me so we never do it again? Something like that. Like as simple as that, we'll go and update your claw.md files. You see how it's trying to do it? Obviously, there's nothing that I just did. So it says nothing to add. But yeah, okay. It added something that I thought. but you get the point all right so this next one is really around using like keywords to trigger your skills so basically i have these like build commands inside of my rules so when i say hey use my xcode mcp to build it'll try to build the app for example use my xcode mcp to build the app okay my whisper stuff is like failing a little bit but maybe it'll get the gist of it from build the app And as you can see, it's asking if I can use the Xcode build MCP. So that's kind of the high level of like using skills and like trigger words to be able to trigger certain behavior. This next one is something called like compound engineering. That's like kind of a new term that is being discussed. But it's essentially to take your cloud.md and start like committing it into the code base. Now, obviously, you need to get rid of anything that's like generic. for your code like file pass and things like that and you also want to be mindful of how large this file becomes right because like i said every time someone hits claud in that directory or cloud trying to read that directory it will load that claw.md file so you don't want to blow up other people's context windows so you really want to be have this be like a high bar when you're committing it but the nice thing is once that's in you essentially make that ai coding experience better for your teammates but you just need to make sure that whatever you're landing is actually helping there's a lot of school of thoughts around this right now i don't think it's like completely solved but there's got to be some form of evaluations here and a lot of people are just using like vibes so you just like test it for like a few weeks and then you just try to land it and then ask for feedback essentially So dangerously skip is essentially like Cloud Code in YOLO mode. Like just basically, if you use Cloud Code, it will ask you to accept a bunch of stuff. It could get really annoying. So a lot of people, they use Cloud and then dash dash dangerously skip. OK, so it's dash dash dangerously skip permissions. And when you run this, Cloud Code will no longer ask you essentially to accept that it i think it will completely just ignore it except for like anything you put into your slash permissions which we'll talk about but you only really want to do this in environments that you can kind of throw away and you're doing specific work that is not like super dangerous like if you're going to start touching the os and stuff like that you could really mess it up i messed up some of my linux machines because i was just going too aggressive and i was just testing it out and i was trying to set up some of my linux stuff using clock code and then like i had to reflash the entire thing like i said you can use slash permissions here to kind of like uh tell which ones are like you still want to accept so it does you know like rm rf or something like don't do that or yeah just like mutations like just be careful with mutations like deletion mutations right um all right the next big one i think now that we talked a little bit about the cloud.md rule of files i think we should talk about workflows because i have a very specific way i'd like to work and i've actually refactored my entire work so that it's works with cloud code you know i used to use cursor or like android studios mostly and vs code to do a lot of coding and stuff like that but I dropped basically all of that and I use just iTerms now. Some people use obviously Vim, but I think iTerms is fine. So I'm going to show you guys a few things. So like I said, I always start with plan mode. Let's go in like plan like a little feature for this Pomodoro app that I've been like kind of working on. I actually need to remove a bunch of audio stuff. So let's just say audit my code base and make sure that we're removing all of the audio playback and references to the audio of part of the Pomodoro app. I always start with plan mode and I'm like iterating with Cloud Code. I'm arguing with it. I'm having a conversation with it. You know, Cloud Code, you're so beautiful. You're so amazing. No, but like I'm really treating it as like another like just good engineer that I'm like working with and I never just like purely accept the first answers that it gives to me i'm always kind of challenging it and i spend a lot of time and put a lot of effort at this stage of the development because i feel like once clock code builds up that context and have good execution specs the generation of the code is actually the easy part and i i do want to take a moment and talk about like kind of the news cycle about people saying oh like people are no longer writing code. I think like the creator of Node.js said like the era of like people writing code by hand is essentially over. And I actually truly believe that. And the thing is, I love like being in the zone and writing code. At least I used to. The thing is, it's really hard to get back into that mode. It's like very different levels of abstractions of the way you're working. And right now I'm just doing one instance of it, but you could imagine just having like multiple cloud instances like this and then you're just actively working on a bunch of different things at the same time. Because you have this like new superpower, the new next level of engineering is really like jumping between cloud instances and really context engineering that instance and then getting it good enough to start executing. And I keep talking about this like context right and this tip is really around like fresh context beats like bloated context i think i kind of cover this throughout this but that's why you want to start with plan mode make sure it's good and then just go and execute instead of like having a bunch of like try this and then try that and then try this and then try that like that will just bloat that context and then the ai will get really confused at some point because it can't remember what what part of what was good and not good so that's why you want to spend the time in the beginning building up the good context have a good plan doc so it always has something that initially was good to reference and then it builds little by little right so this next one is really around persisting that context I have a full video on this about like the second brain concept so i'll link it here but the idea here is that let's say you've finished something you could just say save this to my local claw.md in my projects directory save the work that we just did so you could say something like that and then um i i essentially have a full workflow for this to manage this but yeah you could do that load my contacts from my local projects So once you have that second brain concept, you could say a command like this and it will pull that context and then load it for your new session. So here's a good example. I like to do a lot of my to-dos. inside of cloud code itself these are kind of the high level things that i still need to do for this next feature that i'm working on so i'm like working on a widget for this pomodoro app and i have like a live activity for example and i'm also like deleting all the music stuff because i don't think it adds value so i have a bunch of stuff that i'm tracking but because i keep all the to-dos in my local index like that I'm lazy loading. I don't always load it. I only lazy load it when I ask for it. It allows me to like context switch from project to project without like carrying around like complex, I don't know, Asana boards or whatever. I just keep it all in here. And it's this is this works because it's my own project. But you can technically do this with like an MCP with Asana or Jira or whatever. as long as you can, whatever project management that you can think of. All right. So I think we covered this a little bit, but really think about the build cycle. Like obviously if you're mobile, think about Xcode building the Xcode, but there's a lot of other workflows that you could think of. Like for example, you could ask cloud code to like, let's say you're debugging something that's like kind of tricky has like race conditions or things like that. You could ask cloud code to like add debug logs for example and then run the app and then have clock code control the emulator you could just ask it to do that and then like do the actions that you're trying to do and then read the logs through a tail log or something and then debug that way or you could use like perfetto or something like that for kind of performance things you could hook into perfetto mcps do a run and then have it read the traces and then see if it can find jank just from like the timings right there's just so many validation loops that you could think of like for web you could do like puppeteer and have cloud navigated using a slash chrome command and then just actually do the navigation or have it write just tests or have like integration end-to-end integration tests you know there's there's a lot of things that clock code could do and it really is up to your imagination but it's the single most important thing in my opinion if you want to have a more automated loop that like generates good code on like the first try so going back to the slash models really just consider using opus if you can afford it it's just the best way all of these are a little bit slower but because the way i work is i have multiple cloud instances obviously it's like very small right in here but i have multiple cloud instances running at all times And then the way I work is basically just juggling these cloud instances. So even if one of them takes a long time, it doesn't matter because I'm like, I gave the command and I go to the next one. I'm building the context. I give a command and I go to the other one and then I give a command. So so like you end up like still can get into the zone, but it's like a different style. So I talked a little bit about interrupting earlier, but you really want to like look out for like assumptions or the keywords are like oh i'm not really sure or you'll see like errors happening i'm having a hard time like getting it to do this in this example but um just just know that like when you go and look for the best ways to delete an app i don't know i i'm just giving it a random prompt to try to make it go off course But if you see it going and making assumptions about certain things, okay, this time it didn't even because it's just new, but you should just interrupt it like that, you know, and then just course correct it. So don't worry about course correcting. Okay, so the next section is around power users. I don't really like to say power users, but most people that I've talked to don't really know like the differences between a slash command or a skill they're they're kind of interchangeable now and mcps sub agents you know post hooks pre hooks like these kind of primitives that clock code is like known for and kind of like invented and we're going to cover some of that and and how this these are all like composable in nature okay So I call it the composability framework, but it's, I just really wanted to highlight that these are composable more than anything, but there's four primitive, like composable things. All the slash commands are technically composable with each other, not directly each other, but anyways. So we're going to just go over the fact that like how these are composable. Okay. So let's first talk about skills. All the skill is, is it's like you do a workflow. So let's say that. I tell Claude, go and fetch Hacker News for latest iOS news. So let's say I tell it to go and fetch Hacker News for the latest iOS news. And then I tell it to save that. Okay. And then save a summary to my local Claude.md, Claude directory. Okay, I misspelled that. But basically, let's say that It went and found some and then it's save it into my local directory. Let's say I wanted to build a skill around that. So you just saw me do two things. One is fetch something from a source like Hacker News and then save that thing to my local directory. That's technically a workflow. So all you have to do is save what we just did into a new skill called Fetch Hacker News. And that's basically it to create a skill. It's basically a recurring workflow that you can just tell Claude to remember. And behind the scenes, it's actually just an MD file, as you can see right here. And as you can see here, it's literally just a system prompt. It's an MD file. But Claude has specific directories that is looking for skills. And it will be able to infer this next time I say, go fetch something from Hacker News or use my... Hacker News skill to fetch articles. Yeah. And then commands is basically now interchangeable. It's a pretty recent change, but you can see that skills is written to the skills documentary. And there's also now a slash command called slash fetch Hacker News. This is a very recent change from Anthropic where they kind of like combined commands and skills. But yeah, so now you can just do slash Hacker News and then now it'll rerun that system prompt. for example. It added like an additional like assumption thing. That's pretty cool. It's not exactly what I did, but it kind of inferred that I would probably want that. So those are the little cool things. And the thing is, you could update these anytime you want. You know, you could just ask Claude to do something else. All right. So like I said, you never want to manually create these kind of stuff. You want to get in the habit of asking Claude to update and manage. these skills. So we could say, why don't you extend this Fetch Hacker News to Fetch Twitter or Apple News? For example, now sometimes it won't work 100% exactly, right? Okay, so you see this, it doesn't have Twitter authentication access. So it's trying to just do some other ways. Yeah, multiple sources. So you can see how it's all updating that system problem that we wrote, right? And then Fetch Hacker News. and so forth you you get the idea all right so mcps i think we covered it a little bit during the the rules but basically mcps you just want to find mcps like this right like they're just model contexts but kind of a hack is like you don't actually need to search the web for an mcp you could just be like find me a good figma mcp You could just ask Claude to find it for you. And then most of the time it does a good job. The only thing is like sometimes it's outdated. So it will like know of one that was popular a little while ago rather than doing a web search. So you just have to be mindful. And that's why I'm saying like for certain actions, you want to read how what it's doing and look at the thinking and then cancel it if you want to. And you could have Claude also install the MCPs so you don't have to like manage like the configs and stuff yourself like you had to with cursor. Yeah, so you could ask Claude to install the MCPs. So like right here, it says, go and do this, right? But instead, I could just be like, why don't you just install this for me, for example? And then it will just go and install it for you. All right, so in terms of sub-agents, I don't know if I have one for this. I might have like... an iOS, I might have one like an iOS like context gathering or like architecture agent. Let me try it. So spawn a iOS architecture agent, subagent and do some investigation on my code base and see if it's actually good or not. So you can build subagents just like you can with slash commands and skills. All you do is just ask it to make us, sub-agent after you do the work once the main reason why you want to create a sub-agent is really to do parallel work but also it's to protect your context window so like i said one of the key features of clock code is to manage your context and do context engineering and sub-agent is a huge way and i think a lot of people are using sub agents incorrectly because they do things like this where you have like an ios sub agent right by the way it's not triggering the sub agent i'll just make one after it creates it and show you guys what it looks like it like highlights it in like a different color but a lot of them have this like workflow where they'll tell it to go do something that does the context gathering and then they ask to like bring it back but that part that portion of the context that spring brings back from the sub agent it's only like the output it's not like how it got there so it doesn't have the full context so for those kind of works i usually just keep it within the context window because those are the things that are really good use what we just did to create a ios architecture sub agent but yeah so so oftentimes people mistake that you want to like have a validator agent you want to have like a testing agent and all these kind of things but i try to keep the all the things that need that context to do its work within the same cloud code session because like a good testing agent needs to know about the code that it wrote most of the time in my opinion of course sometimes things can live in isolation so what are really good things for sub agents is really just like things that are atomic in nature that you want to just have it run as side effects and just go and do. But yeah, so that's what I use sub agents for. I don't use sub agents that often. I know some people like love using them, but one of the most common like. clowny kind of use cases that i've seen is like ceo agent product agent design agent and stuff like that and i don't really believe in that particular workflow like you really want to have this concept of bringing the work to the context rather than trying to spread out the context that gets created all right so and this kind of ties into it like you want to avoid like having a lot of instructions and overloading the context all the time. You want to keep your context condensed and fresh. So that watch my video on the second brain and like that's it'll teach you a lot about like lazy loading and then having this like ongoing project domain thing that builds over time. And you want to essentially use that as your rag system to build like a good context and then be able to just have fresh and good context all the time for your ai to execute on all right so here is some interesting like advanced workflows and i really think that the big game changer in my opinion for cloud code and why i think cloud code is just so amazing is that you can do a lot of parallel development this is why i had to like fully change how I work using like terminal and stuff because you could run multiple instances and I already kind of showed you guys this but you could just swap between these and just have like multiple things running at the same time so I could say start working on my live activities feature so I could just have that obviously I would do it in plan mode but I'm just showing you guys and then over here I could just say all right let's test out this iOS architecture and and then just spawn a sub-agent so as you can see i'm doing some investigation on one side and then i'm doing live code editing but the thing is i could always just create another one go to like a different project like this and then now i could be saying hey i want to work on a new newsletter for example so i could be doing a bunch of stuff all at the same time so that's like a really so understanding how to juggle this and doing it effectively i think is like the next step function change and i just want to kind of shout out iterms i think it's like really good um because you know you could do command d to create new instances like this right and then you could juggle between uh the terminals using command um uh the left bracket and right bracket like ignore this like slash it's like i'm just saying oh it's left bracket or right bracket like slash right but yeah so and you could do that you could also if you have multiple tabs like this you can actually swap between it and at work what i do is i rename like what i'm doing in here like i'll say local and maybe here i'll say like remote ssh or something like that and then from the remote ssh i could have cloud like running like this and i could spawn them more you know and then and then I could just be going back and forth here so it really feels like I'm playing Starcraft to some degree right and all of these I'm just doing with my keyboard and when I'm home I'll just like be in whisper using whisper which is like this voice little thing that you see right here and it just translates speech to text really quickly sometimes it's not that accurate but so I'm just like switching switching and I'm just basically talking to it you know just literally working as in multiple projects all at the same time i think my bottleneck right now is really how much context switching i can do in my head so yeah another thing is enabling notifications you could tell clock code to change the notifications right uh you could just say change the notification to ring a little sound when you finish execution for example and then when is now it will basically ring like a little notification and you could do a lot of things at one point i had like um text to speech where it like reads a summary of uh one of wherever it finished it will read a summary so i could be like okay i gotta go back to tab two and then go do something um but that was too much so i disabled it gig work trees is another way to do multiple code execution so one of the bottlenecks that you'll see is if you have these kind of like bunch of multiple instances you'll soon realize if you're doing local development you won't be able to make code edits the same project unless you use git work trees and i'll add some descriptions on how to use git work trees but basically it's it's a way to like clone multiple instances of your code base and have like different forking branches so you could have like you could work on like code like executions in the same project. Slash Chrome is actually a really cool tool, in my opinion. So the way you get to it is by just doing slash Chrome like this, and then it will go to like slash Chrome and then it will open this thing. You can't see it here, but there's like a little button and it just opens it and you could actually navigate the browser. So go to tip number 46. So what it does is it will look at the website and you can approve the plan. You can allow the action. So basically it will create the plan and then it will like do it. Okay. It doesn't really know how to do it. So I'll say hit. Let's just try YouTube. I think YouTube might be easier. Okay. So we'll open YouTube and then say find a video on cooking. For example. Yep. So you can see that it like takes a screenshot, it will like click, it'll type cooking, and then it will like find cooking videos, for example. And then, so I use this whenever I don't have API access to certain things, but I can get there via my web. And because you could control it via slash Chrome, you can have it as part, like I mentioned that all of these are composable. So you can have a command that goes to chrome scrapes a bunch of stuff and comes back to you with the data okay so moving on like i mentioned it's really good for a power for like debugging right you can navigate the web with it that's also part of the validation thing that i was talking about you can fill out forms and stuff all right hooks and automation is really just like kind of the cherry on top and this is very similar to like get ups pre hooks and get ups like posts like commit stuff like recommit stuff So basically these are hooks. And as you can tell, it's just like something to do before you start executing or after executing and after executing fails. Like there's all these things that you can do and you shouldn't manually do this. You should just ask Claude to like add these for you, you know, like go back to that principle that you're no longer manually maintaining your work environment. And a good example on what to put here for the post. a tool use is like you know things like uh arc like linting and formatting your code and things like that and i'm not really using this yet but basically uh this is really good if you want to block like removing your entire like database or something like that it's just like good good to prevent very destructive things i haven't really set it up because you know i have like remote backups and also this is like side projects but for real work you probably want something and finally with that i think you got the vast majority of like the best tips that i know for clock code um the last thing i'll leave it with you is to explore the like the plugin ecosystem all the plugin is is a just a combination of any of these composable things that i talked about like a skill that triggers an mcp that triggers like sub agents or something like that or maybe there's like a bash script that's attached to a skill that can all be turned into a plugin and then a lot of people share their plugins online so this is like a really good example you know anthropic has their own like plugins like structure and they have a bunch of plugins here that you could download for example um like Colin ISP and things like that. So that's basically it. And the last thing I want to say is context is king. You got to keep it fresh, keep it relevant. You essentially need to give Claude the context that it needs and nothing more. But yeah, so go and build something amazing. I hope this was valuable to you. I hope you learned something. Go and build something amazing. If you're interested in this kind of video on cloud cloud I did a whole video on like kind of the high-level thought process of like AI coding and and also talked a little bit about my second brain thing Those two videos are right here to go and check it out. But yeah until I see you guys on the next video. Bye

This is my 50 Claude Code tips from 6 months of daily use personally and at Meta as a Staff Software Engineer. I've been coding with Claude Code basically 12 hours a day really trying to understand what makes Claude Code tik. Here's everything I wish I knew when I started, from foundations to advanced parallel workflows.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
1:04 - ACT 1: Foundations (Tips 1-25)
1:18 - Tip 1: Run from root directory
1:56 - Tip 2: Run /init immediately
2:54 - Tip 3: CLAUDE.md is hierarchical
3:27 - Tip 4: Keep CLAUDE.md concise
3:58 - Tip 5: Structure: What, Domain, Validation
5:36 - Keyboard Shortcuts
5:58 - Tip 6: Shift+Tab toggles modes
6:40 - Tip 7: Escape interrupts
7:43 - Tip 8: Double Escape clears input
7:59 - Tip 9: Double Escape on empty = rewind
8:29 - Tip 10: Screenshot and drag
8:44 - Tip 11: Add context to screenshots
9:09 - Essential Commands
9:41 - Tip 12: /clear resets context
10:13 - Tip 13: /context shows token usage
11:42 - Tip 14: Let auto-compaction work
12:23 - Tip 15: /model switches models
12:49 - Tip 16: /resume recovers sessions
13:21 - Tip 17: /mcp shows MCP status
14:19 - Tip 18: /help shows all commands
14:33 - Tip 19: Git is your safety net
15:24 - CLAUDE.md Deep Dive
15:52 - Tip 20: Add a Critical Rules section
17:08 - Tip 21: Ask Claude to update rules
17:46 - Tip 22: Use workflow triggers
18:27 - Tip 23: Commit CLAUDE.md to git
19:34 - Tip 24: dangerously-skip for throwaway envs
20:39 - Tip 25: Combine skip with allowlists
20:59 - ACT 2: Daily Workflow (Tips 26-32)
21:38 - Tip 26: Start features in Plan Mode
23:46 - Tip 27: Fresh context beats bloated
24:29 - Tip 28: Persist before ending sessions
25:03 - Tip 29: Lazy load context
26:09 - Tip 30: Give verification commands
27:32 - Tip 31: Consider Opus for complex work
28:18 - Tip 32: Read thinking blocks
29:01 - ACT 3: Power User (Tips 33-40)
29:34 - Tip 33: Four composability primitives
29:54 - Tip 34: Skills = recurring workflows
31:33 - Tip 35: Commands = quick shorthand
32:18 - Tip 36: Never create commands manually
33:02 - Tip 37: MCPs = external service docs
33:52 - Tip 38: Ask Claude to install MCPs
34:15 - Tip 39: Subagents = isolated context
37:10 - Tip 40: Avoid instruction overload
37:48 - ACT 4: Advanced (Tips 41-50)
38:02 - Tip 41: Run multiple instances
39:06 - Tip 42: iTerm split panes
40:33 - Tip 43: Enable notifications
41:10 - Tip 44: Git worktrees for isolation
41:40 - Tip 45: /chrome connects browser
43:17 - Tip 46: Powerful for debugging
43:28 - Hooks & Automation
43:41 - Tip 47: Hooks intercept actions
44:10 - Tip 48: Auto-format with PostToolUse
44:24 - Tip 49: Block dangerous commands
44:43 - Tip 50: Explore the plugin ecosystem
45:32 - Context is King (Outro)

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