I’m seeing this more and more, where people build this artificial wall you supposedly need to climb to try agentic coding. That’s not the right way to start at all. You should start with a fresh .claude, empty AGENTS.md, zero skills and MCP and learn to operate the thing first.

I'd also go even further and say that you likely should never install ANY skill that you didn't create yourself (i mean, guided claude to create it for you works too), or "forked" an existing one and pulled only what you need.

Everyone's workflow is different and nobody knows which workflow is the right one. If you turn your harness into a junk drawer of random skills that get auto updated, you introduce yet another layer of nondeterminism into it, and also blow up your context window.

The only skill you should probably install instead of maintaining it yourself is playwright-cli, but that's pretty much it.

This matters for big engineering teams who want to put _some_ kind of guardrails around Claude that they can scale out.

For example, I have a rule [^0] that instructs Claude to never start work until some pre-conditions are met. This works well, as it always seems to check these conditions before doing anything, every turn.

I can see security teams wanting to use this approach to feel more comfortable about devs doing things with agentic tools without worrying _as much_ about them wreaking havoc (or what they consider "havoc").

As well, as someone who's just _really_ getting started with agentic dev, spending time dumping how I work into rules helped Claude not do things I disapprove of, like not signing off commits with my GPG key.

That said, these rules will never be set in stone, at least not at first.

[^0]: https://github.com/carlosonunez/bash-dotfiles/blob/main/ai/c...

This article isn't saying you must set up a big .claude folder before you start. It repeats several times that it's important to start small and keep it short.

It's also not targeted at first-timers getting their first taste of AI coding. It's a guide for how to use these tools to deal with frustrations you will inevitably encounter with AI coding.

Though really, many of the complaints about AI coding on HN are written by beginners who would also benefit from a simple .claude configuration that includes their preferences and some guidelines. A frequent complaint from people who do drive-by tests of AI coding tools before giving up is that the tools aren't reading their mind or the tools keep doing things the user doesn't want. Putting a couple lines into AGENTS.md or the .claude folder can fix many of those problems quickly.

Yes, but as soon as you start checking in and sharing access to a project with other developers these things become shared.

Working out how to work on code on your own with agentic support is one thing. Working out how to work on it as a team where each developer is employing agentic tools is a whole different ballgame.

Seriously, just use plan mode first and you get like 90% of the way there, with CC launching subagents that will generally do the right thing anyway.

IMHO most of this “customize your config to be more productive” stuff will go away within a year, obsoleted by improved models and harnesses.

Just like how all the lessons for how to use LLMs in code from 1-2 years ago are already long forgotten.

2 months ago I built (with Claude) a quite advanced Python CLI script and Claude Skill that searches and filters the Claude logs to access information from other sessions or from the same session before context compaction. But today Claude Code has a builtin feature to search its logs and will readily do it when needed.

My point is, these custom things are often short lived band-aids, and may not be needed with better default harnesses or smarter future models.

this is true, but i think people are best off starting with SOME project that gives users an idea of how to organize and think about stuff. for me, this is gastown, and i now have what has gotta be the most custom gastown install out there. could not agree more that your ai experience must be that which you build for yourself, not a productized version that portends to magically agentize your life. i think this is the real genius of gastown— not how it works, but that it does work and yegge built it from his own mind. so i’ve taken the same lesson and run very, very far with it, while also going in a totally different direction in many ways. but it is a work of genius, and i respect the hell out of him for putting it out there.

It's not as bucolic as this when trying to get an org on board. We're currently very open to using Claude, but the unknowns are still the unknowns, so the guardrails the `.claude` folder provides gives us comfort when gaining familiarity with the tool.

.claude has become the new dotfiles. And what do people do when they want to start using dotfiles ? they copy other’s dotfiles and same is happening here :)

I totally agree with you that this not the right way to start. But, in my experience, the more you use the tool the more of a "feel" you get for it, and knowing how all these different pieces work and line up can be quite useful (though certainly not mandatory). It's been immensely frustrating to me how difficult it is to find all this info with all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.

I agree with most of this, with one important exception: you should have some form of sandboxing in place before running any local AI agent. The easiest way to do that is with .claude/settings.json[0].

This is important no matter how experienced you are, but arguable the most important when you don't know what you're doing.

0: or if you don't want to learn about that, you can use Claude Code Web

Who is building an artificial wall? Maybe I skimmed the post too fast, but it doesn't seem like this information is being presented as "you have to know/do this before you start agentic engineering", just "this is some stuff to know."

Peter Steinberger himself says he's just chatting with AI instead of coming up with crazy coding workflows.

Seems maybe you're just not the target audience for this article.

with Anthropic already starting to sell "Claude Certified Architect" exams and a "Partner Network Program", I think a lot of this stuff is around building a side industry on top of it unfortunately

> empty AGENTS.md, zero skills

which is basically every setup because claude sucks at calling skills and forget everything in claude.md with a few seconds.

Operate == me send https post and pray for the best