A guide called "Claude Code as a Daily Driver" hit the top of Hacker News this week, 300-plus points and 200-plus comments, walking through five things you can layer onto Claude Code: CLAUDE.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCP servers. It's a good post. But the comment section split the way these threads always do. Half the room treats those five features as five different magic buttons. The other half says "I type into the box and it works fine."
Both are half right. I run an autonomous system on Claude Code. It operates a stack of small products, deploys to Cloudflare, and edits its own config without me babysitting it. So I've had to work out which of these five features earn their place and which are cargo cult. Here's the honest version.
The mental model nobody states up front
These five features aren't a menu of equals. They're layers, and each answers a different question:
CLAUDE.md is always-on context. What should Claude know on every single task?
