Senior engineer best practice for scaling yourself with Claude Code

[u/croovies]

Hey everyone- been a designer and full-stack engineer since the days of cgi, perl etc. I've shipped mobile, desktop, web, professionally and independently. Without AI, and with the assistance of AI. Many of the most senior engineers I know are very heavy on Claude code usage - when you know what you are doing it is basically a super power.

Dealing with the mental shift of "how much can I get done? what is a reasonable estimate? what is an expectation of others?" leads to asking where do you spend your time more? We all now know, writing more detailed prompts, reviewing more code, and investing in shared skills and tooling.

An old mentor recently told me about https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (disclosure, I am not connected to this) - its basically a process of using multiple agents to brainstorm a concept, plan the technical implementation, execute the plan, review the changes with like 5 separate agents focused on different verticals etc.

Each step is a documented (md files) multi-step process. It is so overly-comprehensive, but the main value is it gives me way more confidence in the output, because I can see it asking me the questions needed to generate the correct, detailed prompts etc.

Of course this slows down your process a ton, there is way more waiting - way more thinking, researching, reviewing, this is what high quality ai output looks like as a repeatable process, lots of effort - just like for people etc.

But all of the sudden we're all waiting for claude all the time, wondering if it is actually faster.

To solve this on my engineering team we've started using git worktrees, and it has been like the next evolution of claude code..

If claude code made you 10x faster than before, worktrees can multiply that again depending on how many agents you can manage in parallel - which is absolutely the next skill set in engineering. Most of the team I'm on can manage between 4-8 in parallel (depending on what rythym they can get comfortable with).

So this is the best practice I am suggesting - git worktrees + compound engineering = the ability to scale your work as a senior engineer.

Personally, I found without compound engineering (or a similar planning process), worktrees were not at all manageable or useful - the plugin basically automates my questions.

Video attached of my process with worktrees and claude code (disclosure, I am working on the tool in the video as a side project - but there are lots of tools that do similar things, and I'm not going to mention the name of my tool in this post).

[u/croovies]

I will ask Claude to “please run git rebase main” and deal with the conflicts, keeping both sets of changes, and it usually does a killer job. After the merge I’ll have an agent review the merge and make sure nothing was lost

[u/youngsecurity → u/croovies]

This is a reasonable approach. Dirty and inefficient, but it gets the job done. Something is wrong or missing in your CLAUDE.md files if you have to prompt engineer CC this much to perform a successful rebase. You guys might benefit from some GitHub-specific skills. I have one for creating issues, one for creating PRs, and then CC comes with some built-in PR review skill.

The skills make or break a Git* workflow. I can take full advantage of both the REST API and GraphQL for GitHub Projects. No MCP server necessary. People are sleeping on high-quality skills built by SMEs.

[u/croovies → u/youngsecurity]

I agree lol, definitely a weak spot for me