The right set of techniques is highly situational and HN is full of people just dipping their toes into agentic coding. I’ve been using Claude Code for over a

The right set of techniques is highly situational and HN is full of people just dipping their toes into agentic coding. I’ve been using Claude Code for over a year and built a 300k+ saas codebase with it. I use zero skills, zero MCPs, zero adornments to the base model. I have built something very different from what others have: my “stack” is a collection of Claude Code hooks that force the model to do test driven development, also known as TDD or “red/green/refactor”. It’s a process for building software that’s decades old, but was always a PITA to do solo. It’s kind of like the scene in karate kid - wax on, wax off… - Write failing tests. - Watch them fail (if they pass, whoops! Your tests are wrong!) - Write code that makes the tests pass - Witness them pass - Optionally refactor (since you have tests that you saw fail and made pass - you can refactor with impunity) - Repeat from start.. The agent is forced through this loop. The automation is deterministic and uses a state machine. Automation forces the model write end to end tests and unit/integration/component tests before it’s permitted to write code. Witnessing tests fail first proves that they test something, and depending on e2e tests means that in a year of building I’ve never had to hand my model a browser. Instead it will write Playwright code to validate its work, and that becomes forever part of the codebase, preventing regressions forever. Even despite this, I test everything manually and review every line I merge. It takes 10x as long to get a change into shape for merging as the model spent building it. Even though it emerged in a working state from the model no lint errors. Working at this level of complexity for 40-50 hours a week, you end up glad for the weekend - or glad to do prototypes. When you can do stuff that’s one-shottable you absolutely should. When I want something as simple as you’re describing, I write prompts and test by hand. I rarely if ever read the code. In other words, it’s highly situational. If you want to see my process, the codebase is at https://codeleash.dev https://codeleash.dev. Thanks for reading!