~/blog/tag/tooling
Tooling
Tools, workflows and configuration that accelerate the development process.
What I write about here
Tools sit between what you mean and what gets done. That sentence sounds obvious until you watch a team adopt a tool that does the opposite, and ship worse code with more confidence.
The posts under this tag are mostly about tooling for working with AI. CLAUDE.md files. Hooks. Skills, plugins, the surrounding scaffolding that turns an agent from a clever autocomplete into something with rules and memory. Half of them are guides to specific patterns that have held up. The other half are critical assessments of tools that look impressive in a demo and fall apart when you put real work through them.
The test I keep applying is simple. Does this tool make my intent more explicit, or does it make the output feel more confident? Those are very different things. A tool that forces you to specify what you want is useful. A tool that paraphrases your vague prompt into fluent code is a liability, no matter how good the demo looked.
Read these posts expecting opinions on specific instruments. I name names. Some tools earn their stars. Some do not.
If you are just getting started with this tooling, the Agentic coding guide is the shortest route through the posts that matter.
Best entry points
- Claude Code hooks: deterministic control over AI workflows
Where deterministic control over agent behaviour starts. The tool feature I lean on most heavily.
- The CLAUDE.md file: give your AI permanent memory
The simplest pattern with the biggest impact. Give the agent the context it cannot infer.
- Caveman vs context-mode: small mouth, or smaller room?
Two tools that try to solve the same problem differently. A worked comparison and what it tells you about choosing instruments.
Claude Code credential masking: keep secrets out of your sandbox
How to configure Claude Code sandbox credential masking so your agent shell holds a sentinel instead of your real token: env vars, JWT claims, AWS re-signing, and the three things this control does not buy you.
read →Sharing Claude Code config across a team: what a repo can and cannot enforce
How to share Claude Code config with your team: what belongs in CLAUDE.md versus .claude/settings.json, what a colleague can quietly override on their own machine, and why committed allow rules do nothing until each developer accepts a dialog.
Claude Code cross-session messaging: how to make your sessions talk to each other
Cross-session messaging lets one Claude Code session send a message to another. How to use it, what a message can and cannot do once it arrives, and the settings that decide whether it gets delivered at all.
Claude Code checkpoints and /rewind: how to undo an agent's changes
How checkpointing and /rewind work in Claude Code, what a checkpoint captures, and where git still has to do the work.
Debugging with a coding agent: give it the search, keep the hypothesis
An AI debugging workflow for Claude Code and other agents: what the fault-localisation research shows agents miss, and how to split the work so the hypothesis stays with you.
Claude Code plan mode: decide before the agent writes
How plan mode works in Claude Code: the plan file on disk, the five phases you never see, and the places where read-only turns out to be a suggestion.
Git worktrees for parallel coding agents: what they isolate and what they share
Git worktrees give parallel coding agents their own files and nothing else. What --worktree isolates in Claude Code, what stays shared across the one .git, and the isolation choices the flag does not make for you.
Claude Code context management: when to /clear and when to /compact
Context management in Claude Code got harder when the window got bigger. What /context actually measures, why /compact is a lossy re-encode of your session, and the rule I use for when to clear instead.
Claude Code /doctor: the health check became a context audit
What /doctor actually checks in Claude Code now: ten checks, and only two of them care whether the thing is installed. The rest audit what you loaded.
AI agent incident response: what to do when your coding agent goes wrong
A five-phase runbook for the hour after a coding agent breaks something: freeze the session, reconstruct from the transcript, work out the blast radius, rotate, and fix the permission that allowed it.