I researched this the other day, the recommended (by Anthropic) way to do this is to have a CLAUDE.md with a single line in it:

  @AGENTS.md

    At this point these tools are all pretty good. I also feel like folks often also over index on the output style or UI. Like to me the “you’re absolutely right!” sycophancy isn’t a notable bug; it’s a signal that you’re too in-the-loop. Generally my goal is to “shoot and forget”—to delegate, set the context, and let it work. Judging the tool by the final PR and not how it gets there.

You're going to immediately be overwhelmed with code, comments, markdown files, and all manner of extra text that may or may not solve your problem. The chore then becomes PR reviews of tons of iffy code, and if you merge too much of it, after too long your codebase will be a bloated mess that even the craftiest prompts won't untangle.

It's best to use to brainstorm and implement very targeted prompts, set and forget is crazy.

> Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway that provides a few powerful, high-level tools [...] In this model, MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way.

read the document at https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-i-use-every-claude-code-feature and tell me how to improve my Claude code setup

We are literally having to play mind games with our tooling now to convince and coax it into doing certain things. I swear we are not far off from having to call in sick to work because your LLM "is going through a lot right now and just needs a mental health break".

Em dash and "it's not X, it's Y" in one sentence. Tired of reading posts written by AI. Feels disrespectful to your readers

I've found myself doing similar workarounds. I'm guessing anthropic will just make the /compact command do this instead soon enough.

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. "Fix login.ts lines 148-160, it's broken like this ___"

Just to not confuse, MCP is like an api but the underlying api can execute an Skill. So, its not MCP vs Skill as a contest. It's just the broad concept of a "flexible" skill vs "parameter" based Api. And again parameter based APIs can also be flexible depending on how we write it except that it lacks SKILL.md in case of Skills which guides llm to be more generic than a pure API.

By the way, if you are a Mac user, you can execute Skills locally via OpenSkills[1] that I have created using apple contianers.

1. OpenSkills -https://github.com/BandarLabs/open-skills

I use Claude all the time, and this is probably my biggest issue with it. I just workaround by manually supplying context in prompts, but it’s kind of annoying to do so.

Does anyone else struggle with this or am I just doing something horribly wrong?

This feels like a false economy to me for real sized changes, but maybe I’m just a weak code reviewer. For code I really don’t care about, I’m happy to do this, but if I ever need to understand that code I have an uphill battle. OTOH reading intermediate diffs and treating the process like actual pair programming has worked well for me, left me with changes I’m happy with, and codebases I understand well enough to debug.

I have started experimenting with a skills/ directory in my open source software, and then made a plugin marketplace that just pulls them in. It works well, but I don't know how scalable it will be.

https://github.com/juanre/ai-tools

My concern with hardcoding paths inside a doc, it will likely become outdated as the codebase evolves.

One solution would be to script it and have it run pre commit to regenerate the Claude.md with the new paths.

There probably is potential for even more dev tooling that 1. Ensure reference paths are always correct, 2. Enforces standard for how references are documented in Claude.md (and lints things like length)

Perhaps using some kind of inline documentation standard like jsdoc if it’s a ts file or a naming convention if it’s an Md file

Example:

// @claude.md // For complex … usage or if you encounter a FooBarError, see ${path} for advanced troubleshooting steps

Most of the time I'm just pasting code blocks directly into raycast and once I've fixed the bug or got the properly transformed code in the shape that I aimed for, then I paste it back into neovim. Next i'm going to try out "opencode"[0], because I've heard some good things about it. For now, I'm happy with my current workflow.

[0] https://github.com/NickvanDyke/opencode.nvim

This is how we are doing it too, for the same reasons. For now, much easier to administer than trying to figure out who spends enough to get a real Claude Code seat. The other nice thing about using API keys is that you basically never hit rate limits.

- https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake

- https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/712

Right now these are reading like a guide to prolog in the 1980s.

Please stop expecting every engineer on the team to be an ai engineer just to get started with coding agents

If no anonymous access is provided, is there a way to create an account with a noscript/basic (x)html/classic web browsers in order to get an API key secret?

Because I do not use web engines from the "whatng" cartel.

To add insult to injury, my email is self-hosted with IP literals to avoid funding the DNS people which are mostly now in strong partnership with the "whatng" cartel (email with IP literals are "stronger" than SPF since it does the same and more). An email is often required for account registration.