After 1,000 Hours In Claude Code, I Only Use These 10 Things

Every one of these survived a thousand hours of real builds. Number ten is the one almost nobody sets up, and it's the one that matters most.

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Six months ago I was clicking approve on every permission, one at a time, like it was my job.

I'd close a session at night, open a fresh one in the morning, and Claude had forgotten everything.

And when a build went wrong, I spent the rest of the day burning tokens reversing something that should never have been built.

The irony is I'd already taught thousands of people to use Claude Code from zero.

My own setup was the problem.

So I went back through a thousand hours of real builds and deleted most of what I tried.

What survived is the list below.

Some of it installs in sixty seconds.

The last one is the difference between Claude starting every session from scratch and getting smarter the more you use it.

The setting that ends permission-clicking

Auto mode.

Shift tab in the terminal, or the dropdown at the bottom of the desktop app, and Claude runs on its own.

You tell it to build the project and you walk away.

This is not the old dangerously-skip-permissions flag.

Auto mode has real guardrails, blocks the dangerous commands, and lets you add your own rules on top.

It's on Pro and Max, desktop and terminal, and takes sixty seconds to switch on.

Make it plan before it builds

Auto mode solves the clicking.

It doesn't solve Claude confidently building the wrong thing at speed.

Plan mode does.

Same shift tab menu.

In plan mode Claude can't build anything, it can only produce a plan.

Your job is to actually read it.

Most people skim, approve, and hope, then pay for it in tokens going backwards.

Once the plan is right, approve it and Claude executes in auto mode.

Plan first, build hands-free.

Keep building when you leave your desk

You're mid-session and you've got to head out.

Type /remote-control in the terminal and open the Claude app on your phone.

It connects straight into the session running on your machine.

Same session, same context.

I've continued builds from the back of a taxi.

The plugin that gives Claude a build pipeline

Superpowers.

I tried GSD first and it was too bloated.

Superpowers runs the way I already build.

You brainstorm, it turns that into a plan, the plan becomes an implementation plan, and parallel subagents build it while a checklist tracks everything on screen.

I voice-noted a rough idea for a Facebook ad campaign and it came back with audience, angles, ad copy, and targeting.

Say "let's brainstorm" or "let's make a plan" and it invokes the right skill on its own, no slash command needed.

Install is a copy-paste from the GitHub readme.

Four rules that stop Claude breaking your projects

Your CLAUDE.md is the instruction file Claude reads before it touches anything.

Andrej Karpathy's version has four rules worth stealing.

Think before coding, so assumptions and trade-offs get surfaced instead of hidden.

Simplicity first, minimum code that solves the problem.

Surgical changes, only touch the files it was asked to touch.

Goal-driven execution, define what done looks like and loop until it's verified.

Already have a CLAUDE.md?

Paste his rules into a chat and ask Claude to merge them in.

Everything you do twice becomes a skill

A skill is your process, saved, so Claude runs it the same way every time.

My content skill takes a YouTube transcript and returns thirty hooks scored against direct-response criteria.

I pick the winner, because I'm a copywriter and that call stays human.

My image skill works the same way, pulling from recipes built off my best-performing post images.

One warning.

I've installed plenty of other people's skills and deleted most of them.

They don't have your context.

Use the built-in skill-creator and build your own.

Talk at 108 words a minute

The biggest improvement to my build quality had nothing to do with Claude.

It's how I talk to it.

Wispr Flow.

Hold FN and spacebar, ramble for up to six minutes, and clean text lands at your cursor.

I dictate at 108 words a minute and I'm past 681,000 words total.

Better results come from more context, and nobody types six minutes of context into a prompt box.

In an office, plug in headphones and whisper into the mic.

That's literally why it's called Wispr Flow.

$2,000 of usage on a £100 plan

Every skill and MCP you install loads into every session's context.

Bloat compounds quietly.

Some of my students start a fresh session with 15% already gone.

Mine sits under 2%.

The token optimizer dashboard shows where it all goes and what to cut.

It also shows what your usage would cost at API rates.

Mine came in over $2,000 last month.

One habit worth stealing: at 35 to 40% of the context window, write a handoff file and clear the session.

Agents that work while you sleep

Skills run when you run them.

Routines run when you're asleep.

The routines tab in Claude Code desktop puts any skill or workflow on a schedule.

Mine runs a revenue report every Monday at 8am.

Run them remotely if you can, because a routine on your laptop dies the moment the lid closes.

A skill you built once, running on a schedule forever, is the closest thing to an employee that doesn't sleep.

The one that matters most

Everything above makes a session better.

This one makes every session after it better.

People call it a second brain and it sounds like a buzzword.

Strip the language away and it's markdown files in folders.

Mine lives in Obsidian, and Claude Code reads the same folder.

My voice profile, my brand assets, past newsletters, project docs, transcripts.

When I say "reference the email we wrote last week," Claude knows what that is.

Without this layer, every session starts from zero.

With it, the context compounds.

People skip it because it sounds like a project.

It's a folder.

Start with three files.

Set up even half of this list and Claude Code stops behaving like a chatbot and starts running like a system.

You can install all ten yourself, everything above is free or close to it.

Or you can build them with me inside my 90-day intensive.

We build your first agent together one-on-one, then you build the next two or three yourself with me getting you unstuck when it breaks.

10 spots, application only, because I read every one myself.

The link is below if you want to see if you're a fit.

https://theaiarchitects.com/x/mentorship/claude-code-10-hacks