Part 4 of Claude Code, Beyond the Prompt — patterns from running a live automated trading system on Claude Code. Part 3: slash commands and skills.
Here's a workflow you've definitely done:
You ask Claude what's wrong with production. It can't see production. So you SSH in, run a command, copy the output, paste it back into the chat. Claude reads it, asks for another command. You run that, copy, paste. Twenty minutes of you being a very expensive copy-paste buffer between Claude and your own systems.
There's a better way, and it's the single biggest capability jump in this series. It's called MCP — the Model Context Protocol — and it lets you give Claude its own tools: functions it can call directly to reach your systems, on your terms.
This is where "chat in a terminal" becomes "operational interface." Let me show you the smallest possible version, then how I scaled it to run real infrastructure.
