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Paul O'Reilly a4967df815 Initial commit: Claude Code foundations and improvements research

Conventions, community best practices research (Sept 2025 - March 2026),
and prioritized improvement backlog for Claude Code workflows.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-03-12 23:02:54 +13:00

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Planning & Workflow

Why This Matters

Boris from the Claude Code team: "Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan before you let Claude execute. This easily 2-3x's results for harder tasks." The community-recommended paradigm is PLAN -> TASK CREATION -> EXECUTE.

Current State

CLAUDE.md mentions milestones and verification scripts (good)
No explicit planning workflow documented
Plan Mode available but not emphasised in workflow

Recommended Workflow

1. Plan Mode (Shift+Tab twice)

Enter Plan Mode before any non-trivial task. Iterate on the plan until you're satisfied. Plans save to ~/.claude/plans/ for historical review. This is the single highest-ROI workflow change according to the Claude Code team.

2. Verification-Driven Development

Give Claude explicit ways to check its own work. Boris says this alone "2-3x's output quality."

For Helm: helm template to validate values
For Kubernetes: kustomize build, kubectl --dry-run
For web: Playwright MCP or curl --resolve
For code: test commands, lint commands, type-checking
For infra: scripts/verify-m<N>.sh (you already do this well)

3. Test-Driven Development Loops

Let Claude write tests alongside code, then run them autonomously. The "write-test cycle" creates a self-healing loop:

Claude writes/modifies code
Runs tests
If tests fail, fixes code
Repeats until green

This is especially powerful with commit-gate hooks that prevent commits until tests pass.

4. The Stingraycharles Approach

The creator of Claude Code's personal workflow:

"Do not allow the LLM to make any implicit decisions — confirm with the user"
Planning phase takes 1+ hours for complex tasks, but catches issues early
Structure code so AI can easily understand it ("LLM-friendly code")
Document invisible knowledge that's difficult to infer from code alone
Uses sub-agents plus reusable skills, with most skills invoking Python scripts

Reference: https://github.com/solatis/claude-config/

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