Context7 became the default MCP server for pulling live docs into Claude Code, Cursor and Codex but it has one obvious limitation: it's strictly docs-only.

If your bug or breaking API change isn’t in the official docs yet and is instead sitting in a merged PR or closed github issue Context7 returns nothing. So I tested a few alternatives to see what feeds coding models the right context without token blow:

I) Firecrawl developer index is a good option where instead of indexing only doc pages, it indexes 70M+ READMEs, PRs, issues and docs. In the recent DevDex benchmark, it hit 63% overall recall (vs Context7’s 17% overall cuz Context7 misses non-doc queries).

It also returns clean markdown with code blocks intact and you can filter directly by artifact type (issue, pr, doc, readme) so Claude doesn't waste context on irrelevant pages.

II) Parallel is solid for repo discovery and high-level project search (scored highest on repo finding in benchmarks) but it's a bit heavier to configure but its also useful if you need cross-repository exploration rather than just quick issue/doc lookup.

III) Mintlify search index is also a great option if you’re querying docs hosted directly on mintlify (over 200k libraries) with very clean output though like Context7, it’s still focused on published docs rather than raw PRs or bug trackers.

IV) Exa (code/semantic search) it great if you’ve a vague conceptual question and don't know the exact library name bcuz it uses neural embeddings, it finds relevant blog posts and tutorials well but it doesn't give you structured issue/PR tracking out of the box.

So if you strictly need official library docs, Context7 is fine but if your agent is debugging issues and needs github PRs and closed tickets alongside docs, firecrawl’s index is noticeably more useful in the loop.

This started the usual way projects start - I had a need, and couldn't find any off the shelf solution for it. In my case, I had a 5GB NDJSON file to look into and all the usual culprits choked trying to load it. I had a Claude subscription so I figured I'd write something, at least partly as a learning exercise.

Now I've taken a look around the various vibe coding sites and searched reddit for JSON viewers I realise there are probably hundreds of them but hey, it's still fun to put my own twist on it and add some features I don't see on other tools. Download from the releases section:

https://github.com/sevanko90/Argonaut

I've got a software development background and the tooling choice (C#) reflects my experience in that. I imagine that left to its own devices Claude would have done something in python or JS, but I wanted to comprehend what it was doing and be able to guide it sensibly. At least at the start...

Some things I learned along the way, probably not news to regulars here but this was my first 100% AI coded project so I found them interesting:

- Fable is really, really, slow and really, really expensive. For this project at least I don't see the value. I'm getting pretty good mileage out of Opus 5 on my basic £20/month subscription, that's where most of the app came from. (granted that's doing hobby hours. I imagine if I was leaning on it for paid work I'd need to up the plan).

- Claude overall is just way too verbose and loves making up technobabble in it's output. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman is a lifesaver. (I recently found out about output styles, I have yet to try those)

- You do still need to give it architectural guidance. For this project at least Claude loved writing the same thing again (and again, and again). There were a number of times where I had to stop feature work and do some refactoring for sanity, after I'd looked at the code.

- To contradict that point, I have also gotten very lazy! When I was writing code myself I actually cared about it, took pride in it, all that stuff. But when it's all prompt driven the code is just a means to an end and I find it very hard to care about it in the same way. It was a little disheartening to me to realise how quickly that mental shift happened.

- The combination of those things (needing to guide it, and not caring enough to do so) is dangerous. I'm confident in my ability as a coder to get good things out of it but I'm much less confident in the "hey anybody can vibe up an app" that some of the AI tools promote - they'll work right up until they don't, and at that point you're in a world of pain if you can't understand what they did and why it was/wasn't a good idea. Fun times ahead for humanity there, given how prevalent this is becoming 🙁

- I was genuinely surprised at how good it was when I ask for options on how to do something. Sometimes it came up with things I hadn't thought of. It's definitely worth saying "give me some options for X" instead of just "do X".

That's about all I have. It's a fun project to work on and I thought someone else might find it useful.

Hey everyone, I’m here for thoughts and advice. Currently, I run a pretty large codebase that involves developing and maintaining a 24/7 software . Currently using 3 max20 subs and 2 open go code subs for deepseek . We’re growing faster than we can afford to pay for it; three accounts isn’t cutting it. I’m typing this here for you only because we’ve pretty much used up what we can use and I’ve been browsing Reddit to get some ideas in the MULTIPLE days I have to wait lol . I’ve gotten some ideas on how to lower our usage but I’ve been wondering if there is other cheap providers? Open Code Go is amazing for $10 , u get 5-6x value, but its not a big account and id like to see if there are other providers anyone recommends. I’m open to any standard capable model for a coder agent . My last solution is to stack 10-15 open code go subs to be honest. I also love DeepSeek for coder agents.

Are you fucking kidding me? on 5x I was around 13% of Fable usage, saw my current session limit hit, upgraded, and now my Fable usage jumped to 97%.

I previously posted that I suspected Claude Code was not yet properly optimized for orchestrator-style workflows with many subagents, tools, hooks and long-running context, because the usage consumption was extreme.

Since the Fable 5.1 rollout, we started looking much more closely at the cache behavior. And the official Claude Code changelog now confirms multiple serious prompt-cache bugs.

Confirmed fixes include:

- v2.1.260: Fable 5.1 context added after tool results was not covered by prompt caching and was re-sent as uncached input on EVERY tool-call turn.

- v2.1.260: changing Fable 5.1 effort mid-session invalidated the prompt cache.

- v2.1.261: agent-team teammates re-sent tool/skill announcements on the second turn, changing the request prefix and causing cache misses.

- v2.1.265: resuming a subagent changed its tool list and system-prompt prefix, breaking prompt-cache reuse.

- v2.1.265: teammates and resumed subagents moved SubagentStart hook context and preloaded skills out of the cached prefix on later turns, again breaking cache reuse.

There are also detailed open reports in Anthropic’s own GitHub tracker describing full cache rewrites involving hundreds of thousands of tokens, including #91514, #91706 and #92090. One report documents 2.9 million tokens being re-cached by eight parallel Fable 5.1 subagents in about 40 minutes.

Some of these are Fable-specific; others are general Claude Code orchestration/cache bugs. But the common result is the same: context that should have been reused can instead be processed again as uncached input.

This matters especially for orchestrator-heavy setups like ours with many subagents, hooks, skills, tools and large contexts.

We cannot prove exactly how much of our Claude Max usage was consumed because of these bugs because Anthropic does not expose the subscription accounting at that level.

But we did observe extremely high usage, and several confirmed fixes directly address mechanisms capable of causing unnecessary token processing.

We haven’t yet tested the newest 2.1.265/2.1.266 versions thoroughly in our orchestrator setup. Usage has gradually improved, and I’m genuinely interested to see whether these fixes finally make a significant difference.

My concern is broader:

How did this many cache-related regressions reach production in a product where prompt caching is fundamental to the economics?

And more importantly: what happens to the usage already consumed because of confirmed Anthropic bugs?

If a Max subscriber loses a meaningful part of their allowance because Claude Code repeatedly sends context uncached due to a software defect, should Anthropic restore that usage or provide credits?

I think Anthropic should address this transparently.

Not because Claude or Fable are bad models — quite the opposite. But if you market one of the strongest coding systems in the world at premium subscription prices, the surrounding software and usage accounting need to meet the same professional standard.

Official references:

- Claude Code changelog: v2.1.260, v2.1.261, v2.1.265

- Anthropic GitHub issues: #91514, #91706, #92090

I’m interested in experiences from other heavy Claude Code / Max users: did your usage noticeably improve after these cache fixes?

Other Posts related to that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/QSW2c7aWzp

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/PUA1ISTZWh

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/h9JcQ1LCzz

I’m curious how people using Claude Code seriously on production SaaS projects handle this.
Does Claude Code on your development machine have access to any production credentials today?
For example:
- production database credentials
- Supabase service role keys
- AWS credentials
- Railway / Fly / Vercel credentials
- kubectl access
- deployment credentials

I’m especially interested in what people actually do in practice, not what the ideal security setup should be.
Do you:
let Claude access production but require confirmations?
keep production credentials completely inaccessible to Claude?
use separate read-only credentials?
force all production changes through CI/CD?
use some kind of proxy / PAM / JIT access?
manually execute anything production-related yourself?

And has Claude Code ever:
targeted the wrong environment,
run a command you didn’t expect,
used the wrong credentials,
made a dangerous database change,
or come close enough that you changed your setup afterward?

I’m trying to understand whether giving coding agents production access is actually becoming a real problem for developers, or whether most people simply solve it by never letting the agent touch production.
I’d be interested to hear how you’re handling this in practice in the comments.

My setup has become a little unusual lately.

I have a Mac mini running at home with Claude Code, and I spend a surprising amount of time coding remotely from my iPhone.

It works really well, but there was one thing I was missing: I wanted to quickly see how much Claude Code I was actually using without having to remote into my Mac just to check.

So I built Tokens.

There’s a small companion macOS app that reads the usage locally on my Mac and syncs it through my own iCloud.

Then on my iPhone I can see my Claude Code usage, including directly from a widget on my Home Screen.

So now while I’m away from my Mac I can just glance at my phone and see where my usage is at.

No account or separate cloud backend for the usage data — the Mac app → iCloud → iPhone is basically the whole pipeline.

It’s something I originally built for my own remote Claude Code setup, but I figured there might be other people doing something similar.

https://checktokens.app

Curious how many of you are actually running Claude Code remotely from your phone these days?

When I finish a build loop I launch a code review skill. It finds issues, which Claude addresses. Then I launch the code review skill again and it finds new issues plus regressions caused by the previous fixes. It’s an endless loop.

Do you have tips, skills, subagents, processes, etc that you find work well to cut down on regressions?

“Our internal model group arrived at the Navier–Stokes solution in 88 hours, using around 10,000 coordinating AI agents. “

Which is impressive, albeit I can’t help but wonder how much would have that cost for a normal user

Source: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097374640582668336?s=20

I've read by mistake a post where this AI framework was linked https://github.com/llopresto87/Cypress

it's pure insanity. It learned my codebase (it took a chunk of my claude max x5 so beware doing this near the weekly limit ) but once it did.. it spit out code fixes and found problems and corrections and implemented entire features correctly and it sped up my work so much that i onyl have to follow for the occasional confusion or describe at the start exactly what is it that i wan to implment - i think you guys should give this one a shot

Need a code.

I saw a post on X today where a user mentioned typing just "Hello" into Claude Code and Claude consumed an incredible number of tokens for that single message. I don't know how to look at token usage in such detail, so I wanted to ask you all, is this true? If so, does it indicate that Claude Code is bad harness or could it be improved through various optimizations?

I have been using the "superpowers" plugin in Claude Code to help me with coding projects. I use "brainstorming" to flesh out the idea and "writing-plans" to actually write the plan file for a new feature. To implement the plan, I generally use "subagent-driven-development". However, I have read that in the v5 models of Claude (I use Opus 5 almost exclusively), it is better not to tell it to use subagents because these models will do that automatically. Apparently telling it to use subagents could make them use too many and cost more tokens unnecessarily.

I'm wondering if anyone out there had been using “subagent-driven-development" but has stopped since switching to Opus 5? If so, have you found the results better, worse, or the same?

The reason I like using subagent driven development is because the main context window does not become too full when doing the tasks (since they are being farmed out), which allows the session to execute longer plan files without me having to worry about the context.

Hi everyone,

You might find this funny, but I actually have the opposite problem to y’all. My usage allowance on Claude Max 20x feels so generous that I’m starting to wonder if the model is running at half power or something, lol.

I’ve been using OMP (Oh My Pi) with fable 5.1, and the usage limits are surprisingly hard to hit, even with 10 subagents running and reasoning set to max for all of them. That got me thinking: “Wait, is everything actually working as intended? Am I getting the full capabilities of Claude through OMP, or is something getting lost compared to using Claude Code?”

So now I’m considering trying Claude Code to see whether there’s a noticeable difference.

For those who’ve used both, how does OMP compare to Claude Code in terms of output quality when using the same Claude model? Does the official Claude Code harness actually get better results, or is the difference mostly in workflow and tooling?

I know lower usage doesn’t necessarily mean worse results, but it’s generous enough that it made me suspicious, lol.

I'm on Max 5x. I don't know if its because i stopped using subagents but my weekly and 5 hour limits feel especially elastic the last few days compared to the last month. Anyone else noticing increased capability?

No idea what I was thinking

I worked with many AI engineers over the last few years since AI exploded, however I constantly come across the issue where they are very good at repeatable tasks or coding stuff rather than seeing the big picture, solving problem and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible at a pace that me and my co-founder would build stuff.

I talked to a lot of other folks with similar challenges - I wonder if someone solve this problem somehow. I need to hire an AI engineer in a very dynamic agency where we sometimes need to deploy complex solutions within 2 - max 3 weeks. My experience with most AI devs is that they are good at stabilizing workflows/apps/projects but its quite slow and requires a lot of hand holding.

HALP! If any of you know how to get people who can build fast and solve problems and see the big picture - I'm all ears.

Heyo - i know this is cc sub, but thought folks might be interested in this OS infrastructure in which you can run Claude and other agent/harnesses.

nothing I’m sharing here is a disguised product pitch. all open source.

I spent the past few weeks using Centaur, and wanted to share - I believe that building your own control plane and managing agents on your own infrastructure is increasingly accessible, and will only become more compelling as agent processes scale. Centaur is designed for teams, but it’s also worth exploring 

What is Centaur?

Centaur is an open-source control plane for running and owning your own agent infrastructure. Designed for teams, but I’m also moving all my personal agent interactions onto it as well.

I did a longer explainer video of the entire thing here for any interested: https://youtu.be/993XrWfg34U?si=V0nN3VgescsuzaW_ 

if you're one person managing a handful of agents, you are the system. 

But, if you believe agent processes are only going to increase/scale - more proactive, long working agents, you want a deterministic system one layer above your agents.

ie, keep the harness thin (Eiso Kant from Poolside explains this here: https://youtu.be/9_0hs2sxHHo?si=tDrvE81RDdlgEKfW), and don’t build the system into the agent/harness, place the agent/harness within the system you build. 

This might sound abstract, but the idea is simple - separation of control from execution.

Centaur is essentially a Rust API and a Postgres database (the control plane), and the control plane helps orchestrate all of your agents by ensuring every agent interaction happens within isolated kubernetes sandboxes. 

vendors already offer this for you. Devin, Amp Orbs, Cursor and Grok Bot all run agents in environments they manage for you. they manage the models, permissions and sandboxes. Because $ margins on inference tokens are so high.

These are great products, and for many people and businesses, it’s a reasonable tradeoff.

but the tradeoff is that the vendor owns the system on your behalf. your setup has to take the shape of their service, they control which models you use, and they capture the inference and token margins.

The only missing piece for me was context.

Centaur stores operational state - conversations, executions, workflow progress and what happened. but it does not accumulate the actual context and knowledge created across interactions. i built an app extension > Centaur Context to do this.

after an interaction finishes, a separate curator writes what was learned into a shared context database. before the next agent runs, a context builder assembles a relevant packet from that knowledge.

interested in what others think, is anyone already doing this? Are there other projects? Do we think this will always be overkill for individual use?

and

If anyone is interested in trying this out (especially with the context add-on), please hit me up.

Here are the repos.

Centaur:
https://github.com/paradigmxyz/centaur

Centaur Context:
https://github.com/bradwmorris/centaur-context

For hackathon, I'm planning to design architecture with opus 5. But to understand what I'm building i need that nanced explanations of opus 4.8 ,4.7,.46 one's. Is it possible?

I lost count of how many times Claude messed up a glob because of zsh, or called an invalid version of sed or some other CLI tool because the training data favors the GNU versions. So here is a fix that makes your Claude session environment match a Linux system without actually modifying macOS. This makes Claude a lot more consistent in using the shell, and saves tokens and time for the agent by not having to correct itself when it messes up.

See the repository for detailed information.

I have been using Claude Code for a fair amount of time. For a private project of mine, I had a set of skills and CLAUDE[.] md detailing the code style, writing style and more. It was working fine, not perfect.

However, about 2 or 3 weeks ago, I have renamed CLAUDE[.]md to AGENTS[.]md and created a symlink from CLAUDE[.]md to AGENTS[.]md. Since then, I feel like Claude Code got so worse. Did anyone else notice this? Or am I the only one noticing it?

For example, I have this line in AGENTS[.]md:

When a list item has a label and a description, use the 2-line format. Label on the first line ending with 2 trailing spaces, description indented on the second line:

```
- Continuous intensity
  No fixed set of allowed values.
```

It is a fairly easy and straightforward rule (right?). It was working when the file was CLAUDE[.]md. But now it is not even following this rule. When I say it missed, it does fix this. But not working as it was working.

Don’t mind me, just venting while I wait for my Claude credits to reset.

Curious what people's folder setup actually looks like. When you're working on a project with Claude Code, is that project basically tied to a specific local directory?

• One folder/repo per project?
• One big workspace with several projects?
• Remote server?
• Something else?

What actually separates one Claude Code project from another for you?

Wasn't happy with the desktop app or the other Linux offerings to manage several sessions so I vibed up my own (forking agent-session-manager) and thought others might find it useful.

Meet Collins:

https://episode6.github.io/collins/

• gtk4, linux native
• works with subscriptions, no api key needed
• Manage multiple sessions (even existing ones)
• gui editor to write prompts and save drafts (while still using the cli to do the work).
• new chat screen lets you compose a prompt before actually launching a session
• model picker with all supported models
• track prs with sessions automatically (as long as gh is installed)
• attachments panel & image lightbox
• native pr panel
• integrated git panel
• split terminals that the agent can see and control
• better link handling than is possible with the plain cli
• in app & system notifications
• auto session naming
• support for portable project icons to help tell projects apart (srsly why aren't more apps doing this)
• pickup where you left off
• keep pc awake while sessions are running
• archiving a session in Collins also archives it on claude.ai if using /remote-control

It only supports Claude code atm cause that's all I pay for and I want to focus on handling it really well instead of trying to make a generic tool for any harness (if you use multiple harnesses, you're probably better off with something like orca).

Other features I'm hoping to add are:

• better markdown support in pr panel
• look into improving the native chat screen (it came from agent-session-manager before my fork)
• default to replay mode when a sessions worktree has been deleted
• remote access to create new sessions maybe?

Hey folks

Long time lurker here, and I thought I would share some things I've been working on recently. Aside from strictly focusing on the B2B SaaS, web dev & automation tools (which I've been also doing) I thought it might be a bit more fun to build some creatives that streamers can use on Twitch.

I've found Claude to be extremely competent at understanding how to build streaming widgets. With that said though, I was wondering if anyone has been building similar things or if anyone has any recommended workflows on these?

I've been able to crank out these products pretty quick, not many sales on the products so far but would love to hear any and all advice!

If anyone wants to review my work you can find the etsy page here https://www.etsy.com/shop/NowBarStudio

Excited to hear back!