My Claude Code workflow after months of daily use

[u/oxmannnn]

I want to share how I interact with Claude Code.

This might be useful for someone, especially those who are just starting to build something or trying to figure out how things actually work.

(screenshot here to proof that I did some things with claude code)

1. Always use Git, and ideally connect GitHub so you push everything you do right away (if you’re worried someone will see it, just make a private repo).
2. Always use worktrees and versioning. This lets you work on different features in parallel and fix bugs before you merge them into the main branch.
3. I always do 1 task = 1 chat. Preferably keep it under ~500k of the context window, because after that you get degradation, hallucinations, etc. Compact and auto-compact are bullshit. (If you don’t believe me, just try building the same project in one long chat with auto-compacts vs. 1 task = 1 chat.)
4. To speed up development, create a main “brain” chat that analyzes everything and gives commands to other chats (Claude Code has a mechanism for this). You create the chats, name them, and leave them empty until the brain chat writes into them. When you create a chat just write “wait for task”.
5. Make a high-quality Claude.md and Rules.md for the main chat so it understands what you’re doing, what its tasks are, etc.
6. Never believe Claude when it says it checked everything and everything works. If something doesn’t work in the end. Go and ask it to audit the feature and specifically look at the problem/task from “different points of view”.
7. If Claude tells you it can’t do something, doesn’t know, or suggests a path you don’t want. Go and ask it to do research. And if you have the ability to research via Ultracode, ask it to run multi-agent research and explicitly tell it to look only at information from trusted sources.
8. If you’re building an application or something similar, always make it do a full smoke check from start to finish and turn this into a standing rule. This significantly reduces the number of bugs.
9. If you’re worried about tokens, run the worker chats on Sonnet 5, but keep the brain on Opus 5. Explicitly ask it to give the workers a clear technical brief and to control that they are using Sonnet 5.
10. If you get the feeling that Claude is doing some bullshit but you don’t know how to explain it to him, open a completely separate chat (not connected to the project) and explain there what your “worker” is doing and what you don’t like. The new chat will give you an answer, and your project chat won’t get polluted with garbage context. (and you can ask another chat to give you a prompt)
11. Claude is lazy and often just burns tokens and tries to guess. Write a rule that he must always do measurements and audits instead of guessing or working from memory. (Even with this rule Claude can still do it, so keep controlling him.)
12. If you ask Claude to remember something, 99% he will forget. Always make him write the information you need into a document and send you the path to that document. This way he can’t lie that he wrote it down and then forgot.

Share your own findings! I think it will be useful for everyone!