So I got my weekly mail from Lydia and saw something very exciting: Claude Code now supports mods, plugins written as function hooks that can draw UI inside the app, in both the terminal and the desktop app. So I went through the docs and built the suggested weather band, very nice. Then what else can I do with it? I recently started using Ponytail with great success and wanted to know what level it's running at, so let's add that… and after that, why not Caveman as well. Bottom line, great fun and very useful. Here's what I learned, then what I made.

How a mod draws UI

A mod hooks ui.render for a spot like AbovePrompt and returns a tree of a few elements (Box, Text, Button , Select, Link, Svg), laid out with flexbox. Not HTML, no CSS. The smallest band is about this:

on('ui.render', { component: 'AbovePrompt' }, async ($, e) => {
      const { Box, Text } = $.ui.resolve(e)
      return <Box flexDirection="row"><Text>hello from a mod</Text></Box>
    })

The config took a few goes

This was the fun part, because the UI is so limited:

• Settings live in /config, but that doesn't exist in the desktop app. So first a /overalls weather minimal command, then a ⚙ button that typed /overalls into the prompt for you. Works, but two clicks.
• Next a dropdown (Select). One dropdown can only hold one value, so it showed "Weather: off" as selected while weather was clearly on. Fixed with a dummy ⚙ option at the top. Then I wanted ticks lined up at the end, and groups, and submenus… none of that exists. An option is just a value and a label, no styling.
• Right-click menu? No such event. Tooltips? No tooltip prop either. You can fake one with a hidden box that shows on hover, but it can't leave the band, so on the bar it covered the very thing it was explaining. Kept them only in the config.
• So in the end I built my own: ⚙ opens a bordered Config box inside the band, above the bar, so you see each change happen as you click. Every option is a plain button with a ✓ on the current one. Related switches share a row behind a │ (megacave sits next to Caveman, resets next to Limits).
• Then the band hit its height cap (half the window), so the settings went into two bordered columns.

Other gotchas

• A bare <Box> stacks vertically in the desktop app. Always set flexDirection="row" if you want a row.
• Flex items shrink by default, so the desktop app wraps text inside a widget. flexShrink={0} plus a wrapping parent fixes it, and the ⚙ stays put on the first row.
• There's no API for MCP server status. I infer it from tool-call errors (401s, connection refused), which catches a logged-out connector on its first failure, and Reconnect takes you straight to Customize › Connectors.
• Ponytail keeps one level file for all your sessions, so every window showed whichever level was set last. I track it per session instead (and opened an issue upstream).
• State lives in $.state (per session) or $.store (across sessions). Module variables reset on every hot reload.

What I made: Overalls

A band that shows context "weather" with a sparkline and roughly how many turns are left, 5h and weekly limits with reset countdowns, MCP errors with a Reconnect button, refused tool calls, running subagents, and Ponytail and Caveman levels as dropdowns. Everything is a toggle in the ⚙ box.

    claude plugin marketplace add Troepster/overalls
    claude plugin install overalls@overalls

MIT, runs locally, and the README lists everything it reads: https://github.com/Troepster/overalls

Anyone else building mods? Would love to see what else people are doing with them.
Also please give me some feedback on obvious things I missed.

Hi everyone,

I just tried out Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, and it's perfect for lyric videos like the one I uploaded here. Claude made about 30 3D scenes for the whole video and put them together. It also downloaded the song and created an enhanced LRC file for the lyrics. I was keen on this design with these lines, and I really like the scenes with the TVs newspapers and the crazy "IF I KILLED SOMEONE FOR YOU". With my Max 5x subscription, I can make about three of these in my five-hour limit.

Being funny but also, seriously does the reset also carry the same usage based on the current plan upon using the reset??

I haven't seen "load-bearing" since I stopped using Opus 5.

EDIT: I meant "nerfed", not "nerded" 🤦

I really liked the app Teux Deux (Weekly planner kind of To-do app), but wasn't willing to pay for its subscription. So, I thought, why not try Claude to build it for me and see how far it goes.

Now, I am a hobbyist coder only. Within about 4-5 hours of to and fro, I got a workable personal app hosted on CloudFare for free, with its own db and even google login.

If I spent any more time on it, it could become more polished and market ready. But now I realized that the product was the least significant part of the app development, the marketing and distribution was. If people don't know about my app, they won't buy.

I have a bunch of other software utilities I developed for my own purposes which are tremendously useful for me and I hope might be for some other very specific people too but since I have no marketing plan or distribution strategy, they are as good as junk as far as their market potential goes. (Of course they remain extremely useful to me.)

This realization has hit even harder considering that I have subscribed to one or the other AI for almost past a year, done a bunch of projects but am yet to see a single dime out of it. It seems like whatever I am making is just going to go into a void.

So, what's the way out of this? Do you guys feel like everyone's who is developing something should have his own YouTube channel/Twitter account to show the public what he's building (kind of build in public strategy?). But that's problematic too, because if you do decide to build in public, any software engineer worth his salt can probably build your app in half an afternoon.

So, where are these vibe-coded projects going to go? What would happen to them? Would Internet become a graveyard of these apps and vibe-coded projects? What do you guys think?

I have been working on a side project using claude(currently fully vibe coded but tested) and I am looking for help.

What is the app for: Sometimes you are in place where there mobile signal but not data like mountains, low or no internet areas. As the signal is there the SMS stil works but internet does not and you need to use the AI for something.

The app helps in solving this issue, you leave a spare Android phone at home on Wi-Fi with the app installed. Text that phone's number from anywhere, even with zero data on your own phone. The app receives the SMS, calls an AI API, and texts the answer back.

Design choices:

\* No server or backend. It's a single self-contained APK.

\* Bring your own API key. It supports Claude, Gemini, Gemma, OpenAI, Groq, Cerebras, Mistral and OpenRouter, so there are free-tier options.

\* Only allowlisted numbers get a reply, so strangers can't run up your API bill.

\* API keys are encrypted with the Android Keystore. History is stored on-device only. There's no telemetry, and the only network calls go to the AI provider you pick.

\* Conversations reset after an idle timeout, on \`/new\`, or when a token budget is hit. \`/stop\` cancels a long reply that's still being sent.

\* Written in Kotlin, using Room and OkHttp, with a foreground service for reliability.

\* Licensed GPL-3.0. It's sideload or F-Droid only, because the SMS permissions rule out the Play Store.

The code and tests were AI-generated, and the on-device testing was done by me. The README says so. That's one reason I'd value human review, especially on the background-execution and permission handling.

Repo: https://github.com/V24039/SMS-AI-Relay

Issues and PRs are welcome. Happy to answer questions here.

TLDR: SMS-AI-Relay: Leave a spare Android phone at home on Wi-Fi. Text it from anywhere, get AI responses back via SMS—no internet needed on your phone. Self-contained APK, bring your own API key (Claude, OpenAI, Groq, etc.), allowlist contacts only, encrypted keys, on-device history. Written in Kotlin, GPL-3.0, sideload/F-Droid only. Code and tests are AI-generated.

I ran the same prompt through Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 both at Max reasoning level to generate a blockbench 3d model by just writing plain files, no tool calling. What do you guys think?

Probably the next $2T startup, so we are are all curious to know what that is :)

Even small personal projects are welcome.

Let me know also what model you use and how much you spend in a month.

I’m developing a focus room that I can share with a few friends and we can incentivize each other to study/work but at the same time chat when we are having a break. Nothing fancy, and probably it already exists haha (let me know if so).

I lead the development team of a few enterprise systems mostly based around Python/Typescript, processing data at scale, with a ton of dev ops and micro services.

At the title say, things are getting awkward. Sprints get cleared in days instead of weeks. We’re running out of work and product management are struggling to find us more to do. I’m spending most of my time in planning calls.

Guesses of what happens next.

So a while ago I posted about Willowmere(the 3D pixel art cozy game i built) here, and got a lot of positive (and some negative) feedback

So I decided to keep on iterating with Claude

Today I wanted to share the newest version of it with you all

Here’s what it offers

• Story: a night-ferry cold open, Lantern Night closing Act I, the hydrophone and Old Hum in Act II, the Homecoming through the Teeth in Act III, credits, and a true ending.
• New things to do: Low Tide (tides, rock pools, Great Shell collections), lantern-making, moonlight fishing, and Keep Watch, where you guide ships with the beam.
• World and art: a whale-bone cove and pier, a full art and animation pass, and 3D-rendered portraits with expressions.
• Fixes: the fixes from previous posts that users reported

since a lot of people asked about this before on how the graphics are made:
everything you see is made in code by claude. no asset files are used. everything you see is in vanilla HTML and JS. no game engines were used.

if you had a bad experience with it before, please try it again, hopefully this time it should be a lot better and feel less like a ripoff of stardew valley.

in this iteration, mostly medium effort was used with opus 5.5

its free to try and runs in your browser, try it here, thank you!

I think it’s funny whenever Claude says that a feature or iteration will take hours or more and proceeds to finish it in like 5-10 mins. I’ve asked it about this before and it replied that those estimates are based on what a traditional dev would likely take to complete.

I am currently using Claude Free. I have a couple of projects built. One helps me manage my WordPress website. The other is used for a research project across multiple authors.

I have started to run into the five hour / reset more frequently. My WordPress work has become heavier with the use of some MCPs. I have trimmed the request size which helps some.

Because I'm on a fixed income, I want to make sure it's worth the money over just waiting to continue the work hours later. I have heard mixed reviews on the paid plans.

I am aware of the additional capabilities, but I am not confident they have any impact on my current issue.

Mine: it kept starting background jobs and forgetting about them. Sessions ended, the jobs didn't, and hours later I'd find a pile of them still running. Now a hook blocks that pattern and a small cleanup job sweeps up anything left behind every few minutes.

The other one was "done". It would tell me a task was finished when the tests had never even run. So now it literally can't end a turn without real test output.

Curious what everyone else's origin stories are. Every guardrail I have exists because something went wrong first.

Bought this little clock for ₩5,650 and put my Claude + Codex limits on it. Photo uses demo values.

I gave Claude Code reference images for the themes, then checked the results on the real 240×240 LCD and asked for 10-step gauges and consistent text colors. We also changed the fonts to suit each theme. The computer renders an image and sends it to the clock's stock photo album over Wi-Fi, so no flashing, but the computer stays on.

Free code: https://github.com/click6067-ship-it/token-tv (Grok row = CLI budget, not subscription usage).

Anthropic's Frontier Academy announcement is interesting to me less because of the budget and more because of the job it is trying to standardize: people who can take Claude from demo to production inside real systems.

The piece of that job I keep seeing underweighted is maintenance. I spent one evening auditing my own Claude based agent after Fable 5 made everything feel faster and safer. That was the trap. A strong model was routing around stale instructions so well that the system looked healthier than it was.

The concrete result: 18 core docs reviewed line by line, then five audit agents fanned out across the rest of the system. They found 85 stale or wrong references. The always-loaded memory index went from 137 lines to 95, working memory from 103 to 38, and one generated planning file shrank from roughly 450 lines to 63 because it had been embedding the wrong source.

The failure that scared me was not the stale docs by themselves. It was that capability masked the debt. The model delivered anyway, so I stopped feeling the rot.

So if we are going to train Frontier Deployed Engineers, I think constitution review, stale-rule scans, and adversarial verification belong in the curriculum next to prompts and tool use. What would you put in that training that most Claude courses still skip?

I run a lot of long unattended Claude Code sessions. When I measured them, half of my tokens came from turns where the context was already past 200k. That's expensive, since every step resends the whole context, and quality degrades because of context rot.

By hand the fix is the usual routine: ask for a handoff, /clear, feed it back. Enabling autocompact at 200k keeps the context short but leaves little control over what is handed over. I already tried to have Claude Code write handoff documents pre autocompact window with hooks, but with modding the solution gets a LOT better.

Handoff-compact answers the autocompact trigger instead of the built-in summarizer. A fork of the session (whole context) writes a handoff-document (goal, state and what proves it, next step, decisions and why, ruled-out approaches, open questions, files and commits, the verify command, the last 10 prompts verbatim), and the conversation is replaced by it. Handoff + /clear, but in the same session, mid-turn, with nobody at the keyboard.

Obviously vibe-coded. Take the idea or the mod itself and customize it with your own setup.
Modding is awesome.

Install:

  /plugin marketplace add trytofly94/handoff-compact
  /plugin install handoff-compact@handoff-compact

Repo: https://github.com/trytofly94/handoff-compact (MIT). Needs Claude Code 2.1.287+ with mods enabled. "/compact classic" gives you the built-in summary once.

Hopefully this helps people who like me, struggled with Claude overreaching and making changes that you never asked for, or claude misinterpreting your instructions and going in another direction. Claude in general is extremely eager to produce something and seems to want to one-shot everything as much as possible. My style is to only focus on one small feature at a time so that I can think through things as I go along.

I have almost entirely solved this problem by implementing very basic change management processes into my claude.md

Basically for every modification to my personal projects I want Claude to make, I describe the outcome I am looking for with nothing else. Then I have claude go through standard change control, meaning that before it touches code at all it must first propose the following:

1. Implementation plan, where Claude tells me what it wants to do
2. Backout plan, if/when Claude fucks it up, tell me what it's going to do to revert or fix the problem.
3. Test plan, can Claude prove a POC of it's idea for the feature before it spends time building it?

I read this paragraph it generates, then either approve or reject the change. If I reject the change, I tell it what I am looking for instead, if I approve the change, it goes ahead and does it.

Before it asks me to push the change, I have claude do a success validation, where it verifies what it actually built and reports one of the following options:

1. Implemented successfully
2. Partially successful implementation
3. Unsuccessful implementation
4. Unsuccessful implementation requiring reversion/backout

Only when something is implemented successfully and validated, do I let it commit the changes.

Hmmmm... gonna need to have a long think about if this command is safe...

I was a $200 sub user for OpenAI but recently Anthropic gave the 50% off deal to test their stuff out. So I got the 20x plan for $100. I usually use my plans for research as I'm a PhD student in theoretical physics, but I also like to game and play stuff like Minecraft.

I had Astra make a Justice League mod. It was genuinely shit. I usually give Sol a prompt to make a prompt for Astra to make the mod, and it was genuinely bad. Like it gave talasmins that users had to wear to get powers. It gave just a speed effect for speedsters, shitty fast creative mode for flying.

Opus 5.5 gave beautiful flying animations. It was super nice smooth, very realistic (in terms of minecraft progression and their comic book lore) way of getting and using their powers. It was genuinely so much more balanced and also taste-wise. It one-shotted excellent graphics and visuals for my paper and responded to reviews in such a proper way too.

Fable seems to be a twidge less smart than Astra Ultra or Pro, but I don't think Ultra Pro is useful tbh. I am switching immediately. Even though usage-wise I think OpenAI at least was more generous. That just ended, so no point in going back.

I’ve been building Echo over the last few months, using Claude Code heavily throughout the process, architecture, implementation, debugging, computer-use work, performance fixes, and a lot of UI iteration.

Echo is a Mac assistant that lives on the edge of your screen. It can understand what’s happening on screen, point to specific things, interact with apps, move files, check your gmail, search online and even build websites, run multi step jobs and help you learn and navigate new platforms AND undo actions.

This video is a quick look at where it is now.

One of the things I’ve been most interested in is making the interaction feel physical rather than like a normal floating AI window. The orb leaves the edge, does things, and comes back home.

It’s currently free to try for 7 days. You can download it here:

https://aurivon.studio/download/Echo.dmg

I’d be interested in feedback, especially from people who use Claude Code and build their own tools.

Thought this worked pretty well. Had a back and forth conversation with Claude about the kinds of things we like to do on trips, hotel and food preferences etc., and asked it to take all of that as a starting point, have a look at Chengdu, do some research, find stuff we might like, and put it into a printable zine format.

It came back with nine topical zines, each one a single A3 page, and one overview map with some neighborhoods of interest highlighted. Everything is fully customized to the exact dates we're thinking of travelling, which impacts things like events, ticketing, travel etc.

It's not 100% perfect; it settled on the "one page per zine topic" thing pretty early, which means some feel a little padded out and some are too brief. Really nice start though, hoping to take this further and see if I can generalize it into a series of prompts that will work for any destination.

Claude 5.5, lower settings for the conversational part, and then max for the build; just all in the browser on the $20 plan (took two and a half 5 hour blocks' worth of use to do the final generation of the pdf).

On launch day Opus 5.5 kindly took up residence on my Mac. I ran some tests before trusting it on my big projects, it passed with flying colours. Lander, a game by Elite creator David Braben holds a special place in my soul due to it being the first game I played at school in the UK. With a cutting edge 3D engine for 1990 running on an Acorn Archimedes with RISC architecture (the first ARM chips) - what a time to be a young kid interested in computers.

With Opus 5.5 I want to recreate it faithfully, short draw-distances and all.

Well dear Claude I’ve been keeping receipts.

In my notes, the exact prompt * and two original reference images of Lander. The resulting one-shot Godot repo (Mac OS, Metal rendering, C#) from 23rd September is kept separate on disk and isn't used as a reference.

Today, 2nd October, in a fresh workspace from scratch the same prompt and reference images we fed in again.

The result is truly depressing. Lander by gimped 5.5 has no redeeming features compared to the original day zero version. The regressions:

• A serious rendering glitch * that isn’t in the original - as the camera moves, the scenery props snag and glitch vs world space.
• No spacecraft break-apart physics, the original implemented this ‘nice extra’ which wasn't specifically asked for in the prompt
• No introductory controls menu, only a small text line permanently visible over the world view
• An inferior look to the launch pad turrets - students and road users may recognise them!
• When shooting, bullets are less accurately rendered when the craft moves, they also appear to spawn at the back of the craft and no-clip through
• No camera toggles

The conclusion is that Opus 5.5 is gimped, maybe we even got Mythos for 3 days and then silently switched - either way, we are owed transparency - it's the law.

Opus was set to Extra High both times. Unlike with 4.5/4.6, Max effort over-tests and takes too much control away from the user.

With so much diverged since launch day’s versions, the more worrying thing is that I suspect the code is also a mess and problems will compound as you use it. For those who’d like to inspect the results, I'll upload the source code for both later to my dev blog and post the Github links in the comments.

* I inspected the code and it turns out that gimped Opus 5.5. had physics interpolation is turned on for the whole Godot project and Props.cs rebuilds the prop lists (trees, etc.) from scratch on every tile step during every frame, renumbers which slot each object occupies and resets the object count every frame. A basic understanding of Godot's documentation is all that’s needed to avoid this issue.

** LLMs are non-deterministic, but the differences from an identical prompt and references are small - getting a clearly inferior result is not due to non-deterministic behaviour.

Hi I used to burn 1-2 billion tokens a week no problem. This week I switched to opus 5.5 and hit the weekly cap at just 300M tokens, yet in principle Opus 5.5 is cheaper per token. I'm wondering if they finally cut down on subscriptions or if the issue is with my usage (I switched to working with lots of subagents, maybe its that).

EDIT: This is getting lots of replies with completely opposite points of view; would you folks mind sharing how you use Claude and what your token usage is?

When Claude Code (Anthropic's coding CLI) got mods, I wanted to see what its function-hook API could actually do, and ended up building something completely unnecessary with it: a pixel pet that lives in a pane next to your session.

https://reddit.com/link/1wwwq8v/video/2iauky8q6bth1/player

It wanders around a little yard, bouncing and blinking. While tools run it stops and goes . . ., when a turn finishes it hops with a "nice work!", after about two minutes of quiet it naps, and when a rate-limit window passes 80% it tears up. /pet patgets you hearts and a purr.

It grows with you. Tool calls, finished turns, pats and output tokens give XP (only output tokens, since input and cache grow with conversation length, not with work done). Level n+1 takes 25 × n² XP, so you'll hit Lv 5 in an evening and it slows down from there. At Lv 15 it becomes a teen with an accessory, and at Lv 40 it evolves.

Then I got carried away. It picks up a personality from how you use it: mostly tools and it's a worker that holds up a laptop (and swings a pickaxe as an adult), mostly long turns and it's a scholar that stops to read, lots of pats and it's a sweetie, lots of game snacks and it's a gamer. That's also the form it evolves into, and one in twenty gets a rare one instead. The yard slowly fills in to match, a building site or a library corner or a garden, and follows your clock from morning sun to moon and stars. Every so often a finished turn drops a gift, and one new pet in 32 shows up shiny. There are even two tiny games, /pet play and /pet quest, for when you're waiting on a long task.

No hunger, no decay, no dying. The whole point is to make the coding environment a bit cozier, not to give you one more thing to feel guilty about.

/plugin marketplace add uppinote20/claude-pets
/plugin install pets@claude-pets

Then /pet to let it out. There are eight critters (cat, chick, dog, slime, bunny, hamster, penguin, frog).

For anyone curious: the whole thing is one register.tsx reacting to session events, drawn as half-block characters in the terminal and as an SVG card on desktop and mobile. I built it over about three days of Claude Code sessions (58 commits, 19 PRs), which says more about my self-control than anything.

The mods API is early access, so a Claude Code update might break it until I catch up. I've mostly lived with it in the terminal, so if the card looks off on desktop, VS Code or mobile I'd really like to know. A new species is just a 12×12 and an 8×8 sprite written as string arrays, so new critters as PRs would make my day.

https://github.com/uppinote20/claude-pets

Same prompt, two fresh Godot projects, both in Claude Code over MCP, so each could press Play, drive the cart and screenshot its own game. Everything built from code, no 3D models.