As with all of these cure-alls, I'm wary. Mostly I'm wary because I anticipate the developer will lose interest in very little time and also because it will just get subsumed into CC at some point if it actually works. It might take longer but changing my workflow every few days for the new thing that's going to reduce MCP usage, replace it, compress it, etc is way too disruptive.

I'm generally happy with the base Claude Code and I think running a near-vanilla setup is the best option currently with how quickly things are moving.

Agreed. Projects like these tend to feel shortsighted.

Lately, I lean towards keeping a vanilla setup until I’m convinced the new thing will last beyond being a fad (and not subsumed by AI lab) or beyond being just for niche use cases.

For example, I still have never used worktrees and I barely use MCPs. But, skills, I love.

I also share something of an "efficient market hypothesis" with regards to Claude Code. Given that Anthropic is basically a hothouse of geniuses recursively dogfooding their own product, the market pressure to make the vanilla setup be the one that performs best at writing code is incredibly high. I just treat CLAUDE.md like my first draft memo to a very smart remote colleague, let Claude do all its various quirks, and it works really well.

The hidden cost with all of these "fix Claude" layers is that your workflow keeps moving underneath you.

Even when one helps, you're still betting it won't be obsolete or rolled into the defaults a few weeks from now.

Claude also has it's own md optimizer that I believe is continually updated.

So you could run these 'cure-alls' that maybe relevant today, as long as you are constantly updating your md files, you should be ahead of the curve [lack of better term]