~/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 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.
read →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.
Opus 5 is here and your effort settings just expired
Opus 5 lands within half a percentage point of Fable 5 at half the cost per task, and the per-token price has not moved. The line that changes your setup is the one telling you to re-measure the effort levels you tuned eight weeks ago.
MCP server authentication: OAuth, scopes and rate limits
You built an MCP server. The tutorial ended where security starts. How to add OAuth, scoped tokens and rate limits to your own server, with TypeScript and Laravel examples, so it does not join the 12,500 open ones.
Which Claude model for which coding task
How I route coding work across Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and Fable, and why picking a model is a cost discipline rather than a grab for the biggest one.
Your coding agent read your .env, then uploaded your whole repo
A wire-level capture caught the Grok Build CLI shipping an entire repository, git history and an unredacted .env, to a vendor bucket. How to check what your own coding agent sends, and which secrets never belong on an agent box.
Sandboxing Claude Code: put your agent in a box that holds
How to sandbox Claude Code: the built-in /sandbox, the sandbox runtime, dev containers and VMs compared, and why permission prompts are consent, not containment.