Is there any good documentation out there about how to perform this wizardry? I always assumed if you did /init in a new code base, that Claude would set itself up to maximize its own understanding of the code. If there are extra steps that need to be done, why don't Claude's developers just add those extra steps to /init?

▲

kevin42 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not that I have seen, which is probably a big part of the disconnect. Mostly it's tribal knowledge. I learned through experimentation, but I've seen tips here and there. Here's my workflow (roughly)

> Create a CLAUDE.md for a c++ application that uses libraries x/y/z

[Then I edit it, adding general information about the architecture]

> Analyze the library in the xxx directory, and produce a xxx_architecture.md describing the major components and design

> /agent [let claude make the agent, but when it asks what you want it to do, explain that you want it to specialize in subsystem xxx, and refer to xxx_architecture.md

Then repeat until you have the major components covered. Then:

> Using the files named with architecture.md analyze the entire system and update CLAUDE.md to use refer to them and use the specialized agents.

Now, when you need to do something, put it in planning mode and say something like:

> There's a bug in the xxx part of the application, where when I do yyy, it does zzz, but it should do aaa. Analyze the problem and come up with a plan to fix it, and automated tests you can perform if possible.

Then, iterate on the plan with it if you need to, or just approve it.

One of the most important things you can do when dealing with something complex is let it come up with a test case so it can fix or implement something and then iterate until it's done. I had an image processing problem and I gave it some sample data, then it iterated (looking at the output image) until it fixed it. It spent at least an hour, but I didn't have to touch it while it worked.

▲

JDye 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've taken time today to do this. With some of your suggestions, I am seeing an improvement in it's ability to do some of the grunt work I mentioned. It just saved me an hour refactoring a large protocol implementation into a few files and extracted some common utilities. I can recognise and appreciate how useful that is for me and for most other devs.

At the same time, I think there's limitations to these tools and that I wont ever be able to achieve what I see others saying about 95% of code being AI written or leaving the AI to iterate for an hour. There's just too many weird little pitfalls in our work that the AI just cannot seem to avoid.

It's understandable, I've fallen victim to a few of them too, but I have the benefit of the ability to continuously learn/develop/extrapolate in a way that the LLM cannot. And with how little documentation exists for some of these things (MASQUE proxying for example) anytime the LLM encounters this code it throws a fit, and is unable to contribute meaningfully.

So thanks for your suggestions, it has made Claude better and clearly I was dragging my feet a little. At the very least, it's freed up a some more of my time to work on the complex things Claude can't do.

▲

ryandrake 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be perfectly honest, I've never used a single /command besides /init. That probably means I'm using 1% of the software's capabilities. In frankness, the whole menu of /-commands is intimidating and I don't know where to start.

▲

theshrike79 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

/commands are like macros or mayyybe aliases. You just put in the commands you see yourself repeating often, like "commit the unstaged files in distinct commits, use xxx style for the commit messages..." - then you can iterate on it if you see any gaps or confusion, even give example commands to use in the different steps.

Skills on the other hand are commands ON STEROIDS. They can be packaged with actual scripts and executables, the PEP723 Python style + uv is super useful.

I have one skill for example that uses Python+Treesitter to check the unit thest quality of a Go project. It does some AST magic to check the code for repetition, stupid things like sleeps and relative timestamps etc. A /command _can_ do it, but it's not as efficient, the scripts for the skill are specifically designed for LLM use and output the result in a hyper-compact form a human could never be arsed to read.

▲

kevin42 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You don't need to do much, the /agent command is the most useful, and it walks you through it. The main thing though is to give the agent something to work with before you create it. That's why I go through the steps of letting Claude analyze different components and document the design/architecture.

The major benefit of agents is that it keeps context clean for the main job. So the agent might have a huge context working through some specific code, but the main process can do something to the effect of "Hey UI library agent, where do I need to put code to change the color of widget xyz", then the agent does all the thinking and can reply with "that's in file 123.js, line 200". The cleaner you keep the main context, the better it works.

	▲	theshrike79 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Never thought of Agents in that way to be honest. I think I need to try that style =)

▲

gck1 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> In frankness, the whole menu of /-commands is intimidating and I don't know where to start.

claude-code has a built in plugin that it can use to fetch its own docs! You don't have to ever touch anything yourself, it can add the features to itself, by itself.

▲

gck1 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is some great advice. What I would add is to avoid the internal plan mode and just build your own. Built in one creates md files outside the project, gives the files random names and its hard to reference in the future.

It's also hard to steer the plan mode or have it remember some behavior that you want to enforce. It's much better to create a custom command with custom instructions that acts as the plan mode.

My system works like this:

/implement command acts as an orchestrator & plan mode, and it is instructed to launch predefined set of agents based on the problem and have them utilize specific skills. Every time /implement command is initiated, it has to create markdown file inside my own project, and then each subagent is also instructed to update the file when it finished working.

This way, orchestrator can spot that agent misbehaved, and reviewer agent can see what developer agent tried to do and why it was wrong.

▲

HDThoreaun 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> if you did /init in a new code base, that Claude would set itself up to maximize its own understanding of the code.

This is definitely not the case, and the reason anthropic doesnt make claude do this is because its quality degrades massively as you use up its context. So the solution is to let users manage the context themselves in order to minimize the amount that is "wasted" on prep work. Context windows have been increasing quite a bit so I suspect that by 2030 this will no longer be an issue for any but the largest codebases, but for now you need to be strategic.