~/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.
// 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.
Skill, subagent, hook, or slash command? Pick the right one
Claude Code now gives you seven ways to steer it, and most people reach for the wrong one. The same task built four ways, and a decision tree you can actually follow.
read →Build an MCP server, then ask whether it should exist
A working MCP server is twenty lines of FastMCP. That is exactly the problem. A build tutorial, and the test for whether your server earns a place in the tool list at all.
The MCP supply chain is the new npm, and it is already poisoned
A config-to-command RCE is baked into every official MCP SDK: 7,000+ servers, 150M+ downloads, and Anthropic calls it expected. The npm playbook just found your agent tool list.
Stale memory is worse than no memory
Persistent memory is sold as a pure win. But a memory that records a temporary fact and never expires keeps steering your agent toward problems that no longer exist.
Speed got cheap. Judgement didn't.
Claude Code can now spin up a thousand subagents from one prompt. The orchestration is genuinely good engineering. The token bill, and what it does to your reviewing, is the part nobody adds up.
The meter was always going to switch on
GitHub Copilot went usage-based on June 1. Developers are angry. But the anger is pointed at the bill, not the thing that created it: two years of subsidised pricing that made an uneconomic habit feel like a productivity gain.
Even the malware is AI slop now
An npm package tried to rob Claude's workspace and leaked its own GitHub token doing it. The attackers are vibe-coding their malware now, and your agent is the target.
The token-saver tax: walking back my Caveman advice
Six days ago I told you to stack Caveman on top of context-mode. The tokenomics arithmetic, done honestly, doesn't survive the install. Here's what I missed, and what I'd recommend now.
What's new in Claude Code: notes from the London talk
A walkthrough of what Anthropic shipped in Claude Code recently, organised the way they presented it: developer experience and autonomy, with notes on which defaults are actually worth flipping on.
Caveman vs context-mode: small mouth, or smaller room?
One Claude Code plugin has 63k stars and asks you to talk like a caveman. The other has 15k stars and sandboxes your tool output. The internet picked the funny one. Whether you should depends on which token leak you are actually trying to fix.