How I use every Claude Code feature

Yeah that's probably a slightly cleaner way of doing it.

You think it would be a good idea to use a symlink instead?

Thanks! I def don't think I would have guessed this use case when MCP first came out, but more and more it seems Claude just yearns for scripting on data rather than a bunch of "tools". My/MCPs job has become just getting it that data.

This is how MCP works if you use it for as essential an internal tool API gateway (stateless http) instead of a client facing service that end users are connecting directly to. It's basically just OpenAPI but slightly more tuned for LLM inference.

Yeah I started with Cursor, went hybrid, and then in the last month or so I've totally swapped over.

Part of it is the snappy more minimal UX but also just pure efficacy seems consistently better. Claude does its best work in CC. I'm sure the same is true of Codex.

Yes and you can select multiple files to give it focus. It can run anything in your PATH too. Eg it's pretty good at using `gh` and so on

Claude is able to detect the lines of code selected in vscode anyway

They all have optional ide integration, e.g Claude knows the active vscode tab and highlighted lines.

Maybe these might be handy: - https://github.com/anthropics/skills - https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

I think if it literally as a collection of .md files and scripts to help perform some set of actions. I'm excited for it not really as a "new thing" (as mentioned in the post) but as effectively an endorsement for this pattern of agent-data interaction.

apparently I missed Simon Willison's article, this at least somewhat explains them: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

So if youre building your own agent, this would be a directory of markdown documents with headers that you tell the agent to scan so that its aware of them, and then if it thinks they could be useful it can choose to read all the instructions into its context? Is it any more than that?

I guess I dont understand how this isnt just RAG with an index you make the agent aware of?

I just started developing self-hosted services largely with AI.

It wasn't possible before for me to do any of this at this kind of scale. Before, getting stuck on a bug could mean hours, days, or maybe even weeks of debugging. I never made the kind of progress I wanted before.

Many of the things I want, do already exist, but are often older, not as efficient or flexible as they could be, or just plain _look_ dated.

But now I can pump out react/shadcn frontends easily, generate apis, and get going relatively quickly. It's still not pure magic. I'm still hitting issues and such, but they are not these demotivating, project-ending, roadblocks anymore.

I can now move at a speed that matches the ideas I have.

I am giving up something to achieve that, by allowing AI to take control so much, but it's a trade that seems worth it.

Often code in SaaS companies like ours is indeed how we solve customer problems. It's not so much the amount of code but the rate (code per time) we can effectively use to solve problems/build solutions. AI, when tuned correctly, lets us do this faster than ever possible before.

Hooks can also be useful for this. If it's using the wrong APIs then can hint on write or block on commit with some lint function that checks for this.

Makes sense. I work for a growth stage startup and most of these apply to our internal mono repo so hard to share specifics. We use this for both new and legacy code each with their own unique AI coding challenges.

If theres enough interest, I might replicate some examples in an open source project.

I treat everything I find in code review as something to integrate into the prompts. Eventually, on a given project, you end up getting correct PRs without manual intervention. That's what they mean. You still have to review your code of course!

I've found planning to be key here for scaling to arbitrary complex changes.

It's much easier to review larger changes when you've aligned on a Claude generated plan up front.

If you have no modifications or customization of Claude code then it comes down to a preference for proactivity (codex) or a bit more restraint.

If you are using literally any of Claude Code’s features the experience isn’t close, and regardless of model preference (Claude is my least favorite model by far) you should probably use Claude code. It’s just a much more extensible product for teams.

CC has better agent tools and is faster. The ability to switch from plan mode to execution mode and back is huge. Toggling thinking also. And of course they are innovating all of these agentic features like MCP, sub-agents, skills, etc...

Codex writes higher quality code, but is slower and less feature rich. I imagine this will change within months. The jury is still out. Exciting times!

Ecosystem features and cohesion.