Everyone's got a "10 AI coding tricks" post. This isn't that. This is what's left after three weeks of running Claude Code on a real project — a bilingual booking bot for a beauty salon (Telegram + WhatsApp, Postgres, Google Calendar) — once the novelty wore off and only the useful parts survived.
Out of the box, Claude Code is a very smart intern with amnesia. Every session it shows up brilliant and clueless. The whole game is fixing the clueless part. Four things did that for me: a CLAUDE.md file, two custom agents, one skill, and two hooks. Everything else I tried, I deleted.
CLAUDE.md: the file that pays rent every single day
CLAUDE.md sits in your repo root and gets read at the start of every session. Mine started as three lines. It grew every time the assistant did something I had to undo.
That's the trick, honestly. Don't write CLAUDE.md upfront — grow it from failures. Mine now includes things like:
