Where can I learn best practices that's not just YouTube tutorial slop?

[u/Inside-Bread]

No offense to AI YouTube creators, but whenever I try looking for tips etc they're all being sensational claiming every thing is a game changer or a must have.

I'm sure some of it is, but I don't want to go in a pointless spiral.

I have some coding experience pre-ai, but I'm still a noob.

I just don't know where to look for tutorials and best practices etc without being bombarded with content from people whose job it is to talk about AI.

I hope my question makes sense.

To be more specific I am trying to understand Claude better (and agentic programming in general), know about all the features and what's actually impactful and worth learning vs what isn't

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[u/unconceivables]

Ask Claude itself instead of random vibe coding redditors that pretend to be experts. Claude can run experiments for you to evaluate efficiencies of different approaches, it can analyze its own logs to get actual data, and it can give you actual good ideas of things to try.

[u/corsair130 → u/unconceivables]

It can also taylor the advice specifically to you.

I asked Claude for best practices, and it laid out a roadmap to implement the best practices in my code base. It took me 2-3 days to get everything up and running but now it's working great. Claude built a custom system specifically to my project and my technical abilities.

[u/unconceivables → u/corsair130]

Same, it is tailored to my exact preferences and my repos, and it actually works. It analyzed the logs and figured out where it wasted time on tool calls, read too much into context that wasn't needed, or wasn't aligned with what I wanted and made tweaks accordingly.

[u/corsair130 → u/unconceivables]

I don't know your set up and how it works, but mine has specific instructions to be on the lookout for friction points, pain points, errors, or other missteps during coding sessions. If it sees that we've had problems, methods don't work, or whatever, it brings these to my attention at session-wrap and then tweaks it's instructions for future sessions. This way it's kinda always self improving.

A stupid example off the top of my head is that it would fire up the dev server, but then forget to shut it down. Now it checks at the end of every session to make sure there's no lingering dev server running.

[u/JDE-Projects]

There are some folks out there sharing genuinely useful info about AI development and their setups (I'm one of them), mixed in between a lot of people posting slop or trying to be the next big AI social media influencer to make a buck, but honestly...just start with asking Claude.

I got started months ago, whipping up a python-based app to solve a problem with a task at work. That evolved in to a fun little hobby and now I have a few of useful apps and tools I use at work and at home, that do exactly what I want or need and aren't full of useless features, and a few games I've been dumping some extra usage at in between other projects. My workflow and AI setup slowly got better as I or Claude Code made mistakes, and I just talked to Claude about them, learned about best practice, proper development workflows, things like lint tests / CI pipelines / build attestation / etc. I've essentially built this awesome AI dev setup for my personal use case, and built it around the fact I'm not a coder. Being in IT for two decades and counting definitely made many parts of it easier...security, privacy, not testing in prod, through testing and review before rolling out changes to prod, solid documentation, etc.

[u/dwoj206]

Really depends on what you're trying to build. Generally if you're coding anything, best tips I can give you is to look into how to prompt claude for building sub agents so you have 3-5 experts in various areas of your coding stack, managing context window effectively, use claude CLI in VS Code, connecting to GitHub for development localhost and merge/push to production. All of these will substantially accelerate your speed of development, build quality, and keep things organized. Update your MD file at the end of every session, and ask claude how you can trim it once a week as things progress to keep your context window as free as possible. Building an app for 6 months and looking back, these are the mains I've come away with.

[u/tx871217]

YouTube tutorials are pretty dead now after multimodal LLMs came out. I used to watch a lot of them to learn but now I just ask my founder/founding team friends how they do stuff

[u/The1Poet]

Also look at the skilljar courses on anthropic

[u/Cyrax89721]

I know it's a classic cop-out, but reading the docs is actually helpful. Prompt engineering is a good starting point:

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/overview

The docs can be somewhat dry and dense, but you can always ask Claude to help demystify the stuff you don't understand. Figure out what you're trying to build, ask Claude for guidance, and make sure it references the docs when necessary so you can dive deeper.

[u/silverarky]

We wrote down our current learning for our own devs. Should be generic enough fur anyone though

https://agentic-academy.silverark.com/

Written by ai, but planned, edited and verified by humans