If Claude Code feels sluggish lately, the culprit probably isn't the model — it's the pile of shell scripts you wired into it months ago and never looked at again. Going from $0/month to a real income in six months came down to a lot of small habits, and one of them was refusing to leave my Claude Code hooks unmeasured.
Why This Setup Pays Off
Claude Code has a feature called "hooks." It's a simple mechanism, wired up in settings.json, that lets you inject arbitrary shell scripts before and after tool calls. Right now I have a dozen-plus hooks bundled across three types — PreToolUse, PostToolUse, and Stop — running everything from automatic git commits to latency reports, self-audits, and project categorization.
The problem is that hooks run dozens of times in a single session.
Say Claude Code edits files 10 times in one session. If a PostToolUse hook fires each time, the execution time of that one hook × 10 becomes pure waiting cost. A lot of people never notice this and just feel like "Claude Code got slower somehow." I was one of them — I once had a heavy Python-based process wired into my self-audit hook, and everything felt sluggish. It took me days to figure out why.
