5 ms·

Is anyone else just completely overwhelmed with the number of things you _need_ for claude code? Agents, sub agents, skills, claud.md, agents.md, rules, hooks,

Is anyone else just completely overwhelmed with the number of things you _need_ for claude code? Agents, sub agents, skills, claud.md, agents.md, rules, hooks, etc. We use Cursor where I work and I find it a good medium for still being in control and knowing what is happening with all of the changes being reviewed in an IDE. Claude feels more like a black box, and one with so many options that it's just overwhelming, yet I continue to try and figure out the best way to use it for my personal projects. Claude code suffers from initial decision fatigue in my opinion.

minimaxir 9mo ago
With Opus 4.5 in Claude Code, I'm doing fine with just a (very detailed) CLAUDE.md.
- austinbaggio 9mo ago
  Do you find you want to share the .md with the teams you work with? Or is it more for your solo coding?
  - Myrmornis 9mo ago
    Not saying you were suggesting it but people committing AGENTS.md in shared repos is pretty annoying IMO. Those things are personal.
asdev 9mo ago
you really don't need any of this crap. you just need Claude Code and CLAUDE.MD in directories where you need to direct it. complicated AI set ups are mid curve
- wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
  It seems to mostly ignore Claude.md
  - AndyNemmity 9mo ago
    It does, Claude.md is the least effective way to communicate to it. It's always interesting reading other people's approaches, because I just find them all so very different than my experience. I need Agents, and Skills to perform well.
  - songodongo 9mo ago
    If you can test how often it is being used by having a line in there saying something like “You must start every non-code response with ‘Woohoo!’”
  - csar 9mo ago
    It’s told to only use it if relevant because most people write bad ones. Someone should write a tool to assess CLAUDE.md quality.
- parpfish 9mo ago
  I refuse to learn all the complicated configuration because none of it will matter when they drop the next model. Things that need special settings now won’t in the future and vice versa. It’s not worth investing a bunch of time into learning features and prompting tricks that will be obsoleted soon
  - AndyNemmity 9mo ago
    I wish that were true. Models don't feel like they've really had massive leaps. They do get better, but not enough to change any of the configuration I have. But you are correct, there is a real possibility that the time invested with be obsolete at some point. For sure the work towards MCPs are basically obsolete via skills. These things happen.
    - dnautics 9mo ago
      i don't understand this mcp/skill distinction? one of the mcps i use indexes the runtime dependency of code modules so that claude can refactor without just blindly grepping. how would that be a "skill"? just wrap the mcp in a cli? fwiw this may be a skill issue, pun intended, but i can't seem to get claude to trigger skills, whereas it reaches for mcps more... i wonder if im missing something. I'm plenty productive in claude though.
      - AndyNemmity 9mo ago
        So MCPs are a bunch of, essenntially skill type objects. But it has to tell you about all of them, and information about all of them up front. So a Skill is just a smaller granulatrity level of that concept. It's just one of the individual things an MCP can do. This is about context management at some level. When you need to do a single thing within that full list of potential things, you don't need the instructions about a ton of other unrelated things in the context. So it's just not that deep. It would be having a python script or whatever that the skill calls that returns the runtime dependencies and gives them back to the LLM so they can refactor without blindly greping. Does that make sense?
eterm 9mo ago
This isn't necessary. Claude will read CLAUDE.md from both: 1. Current directory ./CLAUDE.md 2. User directory ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md I stick general preferences in what it calls "user memory" and stick project specific preferences in the working directory.
metadat 9mo ago
Don't forget about the co-agents.. yeah.
austinbaggio 9mo ago
It feels like Claude is taking more of the Android approach of a less opinionated, but more open stack, so people are bending it to the shape they want to match their workflow. I think of the amnesia problem as pretty agent-agnostic, though, knowing what happens while you're delivering product is more of an agent execution layer problem than a tool problem, and it gets bigger when you have swarms coordinating - Jaya wrote a pretty good article about this https://x.com/AustinBaggio/status/2004599657520123933?s=20 https://x.com/AustinBaggio/status/2004599657520123933?s=20
lukev 9mo ago
A claude.md file will give you 90% of what you need. Consider more when you're 50+ hours in and understand what more you want.
- AndyNemmity 9mo ago
  In my experience, I'm at the most where I entirely ignore Claude.md - so it's very interesting how many people have very different experiences.
pigpop 9mo ago
You don't need all that, just have Claude write the same documentation you would (should) write for any project. I find it best to record things chronologically and then have Claude do periodic reviews of the docs and update key design documents and roadmap milestones. The best part is you get a written record of everything that you can review when you need to remember when and why something changed. They also come in handy for plan mode since they act as a guide to the existing code. The PMs were right all along!
wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
All I use is curse words and it does a damn great job most of the time
- anonzzzies 9mo ago
  Yep, that usually works best.
- lobito25 9mo ago
  Same here :)))), he's really good at understanding when you're pissed off.
- nineteen999 9mo ago
  I thought I was the only one.
dimitri-vs 9mo ago
I'm in Claude Code 30+ hr/wk and always have a at least three tabs of CC agents open in my terminal. Agree with the other comments: pretty much running vanilla everything and only the Playwright MCP (IMO way better than the native chrome integration) and ccstatusline (for fun). Subagents can be as simple as saying "do X task(s) with subagent(s)". Skills are just self @-ing markdown files. Two of the most important things are 1) maintaining a short (<250 lines) CLAUDE.md and 2) having a /scratch directory where the agent can write one-off scripts to do whatever it needs to.
- brigandish 9mo ago
  How can you - or any human - review that much code?
  - bpolly 9mo ago
    From personal experience, most of my time in Claude Code is spent experimenting, iterating, and refining approaches. The amount of code it produces as it relates to time spent working on it tends to be pretty logarithmic in practice.
  - Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
    When I'm coding I have about 6 instances of VSCode on the go at once; each with their own worktree and the terminal is a dangerous cc in docker. most of the time they are sitting waiting for me. Generally a few are doing spec work/reporting for me to understand something - sometimes with issue context; these are used to plan or redirect my attention if I might've missed something. A few will be just hacking on issues with little to no oversight - I just want it to iterate tests+code+screenshots to come up with a way to do a thing / fix a thing, I'll likely not use the code it generates directly. Then one or two are actually doing work that I'll end up PR'ing or if I'm reviewing they'll be helping me do the review - either mechanically (hey claude, give me a script to launch n instances with a configuration that would show X ... ok, launch them ... ok, change to this ... grab X from the db ... etc.) or insight based (hey claude, check issue X against code Y - does the code reflect their comments; look up the docs for A and compare to the usage in B, give me references). I've TL'd and PM'd as well as IC'd. Now my IC work feels a lot more like a cross between being a TL and being a senior with a handful of exuberant and reasonably competent juniors. Lots of reviewing, but still having to get into the weeds quickly and then get out of their way.
AndyNemmity 9mo ago
I'm the opposite, I find it straight forward to use all these things, and am surprised people aren't getting it. I've been trying to write blogs explaining it recently, but I don't think I'm very good at making it sound interesting to people. What can I explain that you would be interested in? Here was my latest attempt today. https://vexjoy.com/posts/everything-that-can-be-deterministic-should-be-my-claude-code-setup/ https://vexjoy.com/posts/everything-that-can-be-deterministi...
- majormajor 9mo ago
  You say "My Claude Code Setup" but where is the actual setup there? I generally agree with everything about how LLMs should be called you say, but I don't see any concrete steps of changing Claude Code's settings in there? Where are the "35 agents. 68 skills. 234MB of context."? Is the implementation of the "Layer 4" programs intended to be left to the reader? That's hardly approachable.
  - AndyNemmity 9mo ago
    I got similar feedback with my first blog post on my do router - https://vexjoy.com/posts/the-do-router/ https://vexjoy.com/posts/the-do-router/ Here is what I don't get. it's trivial to do this. Mine is of course customized to me and what I do. The idea is to communicate the ideas, so you can use them in your own setup. It's trivial to put for example, my do router blog post in claude code and generate one customized for you. So what does it matter to see my exact version? These are the type of things I don't get. If I give you my details, it's less approachable for sure. The most approachable thing I could do would be to release individual skills. Like I have skills for generating images with google nano banana. That would be approachable and easy. But it doesn't communicate the why. I'm trying to communicate the why.
    - majormajor 9mo ago
      I just don't have much faith in "if you're doing it right the results will be magically better than what you get otherwise" anymore. Any single person saying "the problems you run into with using LLMs will be solved if you do it my way" has to really wow me if they want me to put in effort on their tips. I generally agree with your why of why you set up like that. I'm skeptical that it will get over the hump of where I still run into issues. When you've tried 10 ways of doing it but they all end up getting into a "feed the error back into the LLM and see what it suggests next" you aren't that motivated to put that much effort into trying out an 11th. The current state of things is extremely useful for a lot of things already.
saidcooldude2 9mo ago
[dead]
_the_inflator 9mo ago
I like the finetuning aspect to it quite a lot. It makes sense to me. What I achieved now is a very streamlined process of autonomous work of an agent, which can more and more often be simply managed than controlled on a code review level basis for everything. I agree that this level of finetuning feels overwhelming and might let yourself doubting whether you do utilize Claude to its optimum and the beauty is, that finetunging and macro usage don't interfere, when you stay in your lane. For example I now don't use the planing agent anymore instead incorporated this process into the normal agents much to the project's advantage. Consistency is key. Anthropic did the right thing. Codex is quite a different beast and comes from the opposite direction so to say. I use both, Codex and Claude Opus especially, in my daily work and found them complementary not mutual exclusive. It is like two different evangelists who are on par exercising with different tools to achieve a goal, that both share.
- AndyNemmity 9mo ago
  Yeah, at a certainly level, it's just a ton of fun to do. I think that's why so many of us are playing with it. It's also deeply interesting because it's essentially unsolved space. It's the same excitement as the beginning of the internet. None of us know what the answers will be.
animitronix 9mo ago
Nope, I spend time learning my tools.
austinbaggio 9mo ago
It is overwhelming. We have support for Cursor mcp as well, but you lose a lot of the auto-magic stuff you get with the Claude Code plugin. Unfortunately, skills are pretty sticky to the Claude Code stack. It is kind of the vim of AI coding agents. . . One of the goals for this tool was to address context management in a single place. i.e instead of setting up all of the rules, claude.md, and skill.md you just semantic query a specific namespace in your knowledge base. the docs if you are curious: https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs
einsteinx2 9mo ago
I use both Cursor and Claude Code in VS Code at work (so I get similar control as Cursor). I don’t really use Claude Code any differently than cursor. People way over complicate it.
levocardia 9mo ago
I just take a grug brain approach. I do touch CLAUDE.md and then just explain how the code/files/project spec work, like I'm writing a slack message or email to a really smart colleague, and then let it rip, always using biggest model with thinking on. If something consistently goes wrong I add more to CLAUDE.md or even better, have Claude Code just update CLAUDE.md itself with the new issue explained. I'm probably 3 months behind what you could get with absolute SOTA practices but it still works so well that I'm amazed and amused on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
csar 9mo ago
Claude Code is better out of the box, so all that other stuff is orthogonal or optional. If you eg want to give your agent access to your company’s Notion docs you need a skill.

minimaxir 9mo ago

With Opus 4.5 in Claude Code, I'm doing fine with just a (very detailed) CLAUDE.md.

austinbaggio 9mo ago
Do you find you want to share the .md with the teams you work with? Or is it more for your solo coding?
- Myrmornis 9mo ago
  Not saying you were suggesting it but people committing AGENTS.md in shared repos is pretty annoying IMO. Those things are personal.

asdev 9mo ago

you really don't need any of this crap. you just need Claude Code and CLAUDE.MD in directories where you need to direct it. complicated AI set ups are mid curve

wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
It seems to mostly ignore Claude.md
- AndyNemmity 9mo ago
  It does, Claude.md is the least effective way to communicate to it. It's always interesting reading other people's approaches, because I just find them all so very different than my experience. I need Agents, and Skills to perform well.
- songodongo 9mo ago
  If you can test how often it is being used by having a line in there saying something like “You must start every non-code response with ‘Woohoo!’”
- csar 9mo ago
  It’s told to only use it if relevant because most people write bad ones. Someone should write a tool to assess CLAUDE.md quality.
parpfish 9mo ago
I refuse to learn all the complicated configuration because none of it will matter when they drop the next model. Things that need special settings now won’t in the future and vice versa. It’s not worth investing a bunch of time into learning features and prompting tricks that will be obsoleted soon
- AndyNemmity 9mo ago
  I wish that were true. Models don't feel like they've really had massive leaps. They do get better, but not enough to change any of the configuration I have. But you are correct, there is a real possibility that the time invested with be obsolete at some point. For sure the work towards MCPs are basically obsolete via skills. These things happen.
  - dnautics 9mo ago
    i don't understand this mcp/skill distinction? one of the mcps i use indexes the runtime dependency of code modules so that claude can refactor without just blindly grepping. how would that be a "skill"? just wrap the mcp in a cli? fwiw this may be a skill issue, pun intended, but i can't seem to get claude to trigger skills, whereas it reaches for mcps more... i wonder if im missing something. I'm plenty productive in claude though.
    - AndyNemmity 9mo ago
      So MCPs are a bunch of, essenntially skill type objects. But it has to tell you about all of them, and information about all of them up front. So a Skill is just a smaller granulatrity level of that concept. It's just one of the individual things an MCP can do. This is about context management at some level. When you need to do a single thing within that full list of potential things, you don't need the instructions about a ton of other unrelated things in the context. So it's just not that deep. It would be having a python script or whatever that the skill calls that returns the runtime dependencies and gives them back to the LLM so they can refactor without blindly greping. Does that make sense?

eterm 9mo ago

This isn't necessary. Claude will read CLAUDE.md from both: 1. Current directory ./CLAUDE.md 2. User directory ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md I stick general preferences in what it calls "user memory" and stick project specific preferences in the working directory.

metadat 9mo ago

Don't forget about the co-agents.. yeah.

austinbaggio 9mo ago

It feels like Claude is taking more of the Android approach of a less opinionated, but more open stack, so people are bending it to the shape they want to match their workflow. I think of the amnesia problem as pretty agent-agnostic, though, knowing what happens while you're delivering product is more of an agent execution layer problem than a tool problem, and it gets bigger when you have swarms coordinating - Jaya wrote a pretty good article about this https://x.com/AustinBaggio/status/2004599657520123933?s=20 https://x.com/AustinBaggio/status/2004599657520123933?s=20

lukev 9mo ago

A claude.md file will give you 90% of what you need. Consider more when you're 50+ hours in and understand what more you want.

AndyNemmity 9mo ago
In my experience, I'm at the most where I entirely ignore Claude.md - so it's very interesting how many people have very different experiences.

pigpop 9mo ago

You don't need all that, just have Claude write the same documentation you would (should) write for any project. I find it best to record things chronologically and then have Claude do periodic reviews of the docs and update key design documents and roadmap milestones. The best part is you get a written record of everything that you can review when you need to remember when and why something changed. They also come in handy for plan mode since they act as a guide to the existing code. The PMs were right all along!

wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago

All I use is curse words and it does a damn great job most of the time

anonzzzies 9mo ago
Yep, that usually works best.
lobito25 9mo ago
Same here :)))), he's really good at understanding when you're pissed off.
nineteen999 9mo ago
I thought I was the only one.

dimitri-vs 9mo ago

I'm in Claude Code 30+ hr/wk and always have a at least three tabs of CC agents open in my terminal. Agree with the other comments: pretty much running vanilla everything and only the Playwright MCP (IMO way better than the native chrome integration) and ccstatusline (for fun). Subagents can be as simple as saying "do X task(s) with subagent(s)". Skills are just self @-ing markdown files. Two of the most important things are 1) maintaining a short (<250 lines) CLAUDE.md and 2) having a /scratch directory where the agent can write one-off scripts to do whatever it needs to.

brigandish 9mo ago
How can you - or any human - review that much code?
- bpolly 9mo ago
  From personal experience, most of my time in Claude Code is spent experimenting, iterating, and refining approaches. The amount of code it produces as it relates to time spent working on it tends to be pretty logarithmic in practice.
- Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
  When I'm coding I have about 6 instances of VSCode on the go at once; each with their own worktree and the terminal is a dangerous cc in docker. most of the time they are sitting waiting for me. Generally a few are doing spec work/reporting for me to understand something - sometimes with issue context; these are used to plan or redirect my attention if I might've missed something. A few will be just hacking on issues with little to no oversight - I just want it to iterate tests+code+screenshots to come up with a way to do a thing / fix a thing, I'll likely not use the code it generates directly. Then one or two are actually doing work that I'll end up PR'ing or if I'm reviewing they'll be helping me do the review - either mechanically (hey claude, give me a script to launch n instances with a configuration that would show X ... ok, launch them ... ok, change to this ... grab X from the db ... etc.) or insight based (hey claude, check issue X against code Y - does the code reflect their comments; look up the docs for A and compare to the usage in B, give me references). I've TL'd and PM'd as well as IC'd. Now my IC work feels a lot more like a cross between being a TL and being a senior with a handful of exuberant and reasonably competent juniors. Lots of reviewing, but still having to get into the weeds quickly and then get out of their way.

AndyNemmity 9mo ago

I'm the opposite, I find it straight forward to use all these things, and am surprised people aren't getting it. I've been trying to write blogs explaining it recently, but I don't think I'm very good at making it sound interesting to people. What can I explain that you would be interested in? Here was my latest attempt today. https://vexjoy.com/posts/everything-that-can-be-deterministic-should-be-my-claude-code-setup/ https://vexjoy.com/posts/everything-that-can-be-deterministi...

majormajor 9mo ago
You say "My Claude Code Setup" but where is the actual setup there? I generally agree with everything about how LLMs should be called you say, but I don't see any concrete steps of changing Claude Code's settings in there? Where are the "35 agents. 68 skills. 234MB of context."? Is the implementation of the "Layer 4" programs intended to be left to the reader? That's hardly approachable.
- AndyNemmity 9mo ago
  I got similar feedback with my first blog post on my do router - https://vexjoy.com/posts/the-do-router/ https://vexjoy.com/posts/the-do-router/ Here is what I don't get. it's trivial to do this. Mine is of course customized to me and what I do. The idea is to communicate the ideas, so you can use them in your own setup. It's trivial to put for example, my do router blog post in claude code and generate one customized for you. So what does it matter to see my exact version? These are the type of things I don't get. If I give you my details, it's less approachable for sure. The most approachable thing I could do would be to release individual skills. Like I have skills for generating images with google nano banana. That would be approachable and easy. But it doesn't communicate the why. I'm trying to communicate the why.
  - majormajor 9mo ago
    I just don't have much faith in "if you're doing it right the results will be magically better than what you get otherwise" anymore. Any single person saying "the problems you run into with using LLMs will be solved if you do it my way" has to really wow me if they want me to put in effort on their tips. I generally agree with your why of why you set up like that. I'm skeptical that it will get over the hump of where I still run into issues. When you've tried 10 ways of doing it but they all end up getting into a "feed the error back into the LLM and see what it suggests next" you aren't that motivated to put that much effort into trying out an 11th. The current state of things is extremely useful for a lot of things already.

saidcooldude2 9mo ago

[dead]

_the_inflator 9mo ago

I like the finetuning aspect to it quite a lot. It makes sense to me. What I achieved now is a very streamlined process of autonomous work of an agent, which can more and more often be simply managed than controlled on a code review level basis for everything. I agree that this level of finetuning feels overwhelming and might let yourself doubting whether you do utilize Claude to its optimum and the beauty is, that finetunging and macro usage don't interfere, when you stay in your lane. For example I now don't use the planing agent anymore instead incorporated this process into the normal agents much to the project's advantage. Consistency is key. Anthropic did the right thing. Codex is quite a different beast and comes from the opposite direction so to say. I use both, Codex and Claude Opus especially, in my daily work and found them complementary not mutual exclusive. It is like two different evangelists who are on par exercising with different tools to achieve a goal, that both share.

AndyNemmity 9mo ago
Yeah, at a certainly level, it's just a ton of fun to do. I think that's why so many of us are playing with it. It's also deeply interesting because it's essentially unsolved space. It's the same excitement as the beginning of the internet. None of us know what the answers will be.

animitronix 9mo ago

Nope, I spend time learning my tools.

austinbaggio 9mo ago

It is overwhelming. We have support for Cursor mcp as well, but you lose a lot of the auto-magic stuff you get with the Claude Code plugin. Unfortunately, skills are pretty sticky to the Claude Code stack. It is kind of the vim of AI coding agents. . . One of the goals for this tool was to address context management in a single place. i.e instead of setting up all of the rules, claude.md, and skill.md you just semantic query a specific namespace in your knowledge base. the docs if you are curious: https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs

einsteinx2 9mo ago

I use both Cursor and Claude Code in VS Code at work (so I get similar control as Cursor). I don’t really use Claude Code any differently than cursor. People way over complicate it.

levocardia 9mo ago

I just take a grug brain approach. I do touch CLAUDE.md and then just explain how the code/files/project spec work, like I'm writing a slack message or email to a really smart colleague, and then let it rip, always using biggest model with thinking on. If something consistently goes wrong I add more to CLAUDE.md or even better, have Claude Code just update CLAUDE.md itself with the new issue explained. I'm probably 3 months behind what you could get with absolute SOTA practices but it still works so well that I'm amazed and amused on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

csar 9mo ago

Claude Code is better out of the box, so all that other stuff is orthogonal or optional. If you eg want to give your agent access to your company’s Notion docs you need a skill.