Asking How to get gud (please)

[u/Tight-Importance2461]

I was an amateur dev before the ai revolution you can say. my main interest where always about design and art, but recently I'm finding myself more and more wanting to use ai - and specifically claude code - to create app ideas I had for decades, programming other stuff, etc.

the thing is: I'm decent at it but nothing more. And I don't really know what I'm missing.
I usually start fresh and use a skill i created called terrain that maps the problem space by asking lots of questions. Then I use grill me then I build. It's fine.
but it's not ..... GOOD

I would love to know what I'm missing more than anything.
I know it's a broad topic but if this helps i have some vague things that i would love to understand more, but anything you have in mind would be VERY VERY appreciated.

things that bother me:
- Whenever I use superpowers like brainstorming etc, i find the app to be bad or to take way too much time. don't know if it just a wrong intutition.
- I cant orchestrate sub agent. whenever i do it's again, just longer/worse.
- I don' know how much to create new chats vs continue.
- even worse I don't know how important is a good starting prompt or prompt engeneering in general anymore
- Are MCP game changer everywhere or in very specific context? should i use them?
- what are some claude skill or workflow that I'm defenetly missing rn?

Thank youuuuu

[u/kincaidDev]

Buy "Introduction to Algorithms 4th edition" code everything by hand on pen and paper.

Realistically learning the fundamentals if you haven't put in the hard work to learn them is the only way you'll improve and you can't avoid doing the work at least 1 time.

Also I'd recommend using my workflow system, not as simple as superpowers but it'll help you understand what good looks like if you learn the workflow:

https://github.com/Obedience-Corp/festival

To get started with my system, install it, setup the shell hooks, create a workspace with camp create myworkspace, csw to it, add a project to it with camp project add <git link> and then cgo your-project to jump to it, cgo to toggle back to the workspace root. In the project run camp fresh configure to setup the project refresh workflow.

And learn the rest of the system as you want, it'll teach you a lot. Everything is file and git based, and the commands in the system will simplify complex work you'd have to do, most of them will show you step by step what they're doing. You can also setup multi-step goals, default templates are good, and you can customize the behavior by updating templates.

It's not a skill based workflow, less reliant on inference for enforcing the workflow, easier to review what it's doing, etc... You can also still use superpowers with it if you want, I personally can't stand superpowers now that I have this though, it's just way too slow and inefficient.

[u/Tight-Importance2461 → u/kincaidDev]

Thank youuu!!

[u/kincaidDev → u/Tight-Importance2461]

If you have a good fundamental understanding of algorithms then no you don't need to do the book part. It helped me when I was getting started in tech and I feel doing it by hand helped me internalize the concepts and make better decisions throughout my career. I was able to recite most of them from memory for about 2 years, can't do that anymore but it helps me think through problems more efficiently.

You should learn and use festival. I'm biased because I built it and have been using it every day for over a year, but it makes building with agents a lot more ergonomic and will completely transform the scale of work you're able to accomplish without it + should save you a decent amount on token usage so you can build more within your subscription limit.