Claude Code - 47 PRO TIPS in 9 minutes

Hey, my name is Greg. I'm a developer

and over the last few months, Claude

Code has become my default way of

writing code. And so in this video, I

want to walk you through some Claude

Code pro tips. These pro tips are

primarily based on this post written by

Boris Churnney, who's the creator of

Claude Code at Enthropic. And we're

going to go through these uh pro tips

pretty quickly. First tip, cla code is a

CLI. So all the things that you're used

to doing with other bashbased CLIs, you

can probably do with cloud code. For

instance, you can pass in command line

arguments which will be run on startup.

You can use -p to run it in headless

mode. You can chain it with other

command line tools. You can pipe data

into it. You can run multiple instances

of it at once. You can actually have

cloud code launch instances of claude

code. In fact, anytime you ask it to

spin up a sub agent or anytime you see

task, that's exactly what clog code is

doing. Next category, images. You can

use an image simply by dragging it in to

the terminal on OSX. You can use shift

command control 4 to copy the screenshot

and then use controlV to paste it into

claude. That's controlV, not commandV

like you're used to. There's two ways

that you might find yourself using

images a lot. The first is mockups. You

can design a mockup, paste the mockup

into Claude, and then ask it to build

that interface. Second, you can use

images to close the feedback loop with

Claude. Ask it to build something, open

up what it built, and then take a

screenshot, feed that back into Claude

and it's pretty good at iterating when

you're giving it feedback. Now, that's a

manual process for taking images. You

can also automate the screenshotting by

using the Puppeteer MCP server, which is

pretty easy to set up and run locally.

Then you can ask Claude to use Puppeteer

to go open up the app, take a screenshot

of it, and it can save those screenshots

to your local directory. Speaking of MCP

service, Cloud Code can function as both

an MCP server and an MCP client. So that

means that you can actually turn clogged

code into an MCP server that can then be

used by other agents. There's a whole

bunch of MCP servers that you could use.

It would be a whole video on its own

just to go through some of the most

popular ones. So we'll just hit a

couple. For instance, you might find it

useful to use the Postgres server to

hook up Cloud Code directly to your

database. You can use MCP servers that

are effectively wrappers around APIs.

Other dev tool companies like Cloudflare

are using their MCP servers to provide

up-to-date documentation to Claude. Not

all dev tool companies are making their

docs available via MCP just yet. So if

you just paste in a link, Claude code

can fetch that URL and then use those

docs to build against. You might also

want to use fetch URLs to retrieve

knowledge from the world that you use in

your app. For instance, I built a game

for my four-year-old daughter that was

uh Bluey Uno. Instead of trying to

describe the rules myself or relying on

the training data for Uno rules, I

pasted in

unorules.com and had Claude code the

gaming logic based on what it read

there. Next category, claude.mmd. This

is actually the first pro tip that's

mentioned in Boris's post. A claw.md is

a prompt that is loaded with every

request that you make to claude code.

This might include instructions for your

project such as common bash commands to

use, style guidelines, linting

guidelines, how to run your tests

repository etiquette. If you type /init

after you launch claude in a directory

it will create this claude. MD file for

you after scanning the directory and

summarizing its structure. If as you're

coding you want to add instructions to

the cloud.MD, you can use the hash sign.

You can also set a global cloud. MD in

your home

directory/cloud. This will be loaded

anytime that you're using cloud code

across any project. You can also add a

cloud.md file in subdirectories. You

should also refactor your cla.md files

often. So, it's common for them to grow

in complexity as you continue to work on

a project. But remember that this is a

prompt that is being loaded on every

turn of conversation with clawed code.

And these models do much better the more

specific you are. So, you don't want

this to be crammed with a bunch of

duplicative extraneous information. You

can use Anthropic's prompt optimizer

tool to help you write better cla.md

files. Slash commands. You can define

these in

thecloud/comands folder, and they're

just prompts. So, for instance, here's

one mentioned in Boris's post about

solving GitHub issues. You might write a

slash command for refactoring. You might

write a slash command for linting. You

might write a slash command for

reviewing a PR. slash commands are

prompt templates. So you can pass

command line arguments when you run the

slash command that will then be

interpolated into the prompt

template. Couple of UI tips. One, you

can use tab to complete files and

directories. Cloud code does better the

more specific you are. So if you can

actually let it know what files or what

directories to work with, you'll

generally get better results. Hit escape

often. I know that I when I started was

hesitant to interrupt Claude when I saw

it going off path, but you will find

your sessions go so much better if you

just stop Claude as soon as you see it

go in the wrong direction. You can hit

escape and ask it to undo its work from

the previous turn. And that will help

you go back as well. Speaking of undoing

Claude's work, I think the biggest

failure mode here when working with

Cloud Code is you use it to build a

project. You get that project to a place

where it's working really well, and then

it gets overly ambitious, does a bit too

much, makes breaking changes, and then

you have a hard time rolling them back.

And the easiest way to mitigate this

failure state is to use Cloud Code in

conjunction with version control. Ask

Cloud Code to commit after every major

change. Have Claude Code write your

commit messages. there's a good chance

they'll be the best commit messages that

have ever been submitted to a repository

that you own. When working with Claude

code, revert more often than what you're

used to. Often times, the best way to

fix things is just to clear out the

conversation history in Claude, revert

back to a previous save point, and try

again with slightly more specific

instructions. Install the GitHub CLI

and it will use this for all of its

interactions with GitHub. If for some

reason you don't want to install this

tool, you can also interact with GitHub

via the GitHub MCP server. You can have

Cloud Code file PRs for you. You can

have Claude Code do code reviews on

those PRs. Managing context can

certainly be a bit of a challenge when

working with Claude Code. You want to

always keep an eye on the auto

compacting indicator. You always want to

know about how long you have until

Claude autoco compacts. prematurely

compact when you're at natural break

points. So if you see you're 35% of the

way to autoco compacting and you just

finished up a task, you just made a

commit, you might just want to go ahead

compact right there and start the next

task with all of the tokens available to

you. Also consider often clearing

instead of compacting. Work in such a

way that you can use claude code with

fresh memory. One way to do this is to

tell Claude to use scratchpads to plan

its work. Alternative to Scratchpads

you can use GitHub issues. If you are

paying per token, then you're going to

really want to monitor that uh context

window usage and you're going to want to

use external memory as much as possible.

If you're looking for more robust cost

tracking across a team, for instance

one way to achieve that is by using

Cloud Code's open telemetry support. So

for instance, you could hook up Claude

Code to Data Dog and produce dashboards

that look like this. And for more

details on this, you should check out

Martin AMP's blog post, which is linked

in the description. But in my opinion

the best way to manage your cost is just

to upgrade to one of those Claude Max

plans at either $100 or $200. I'm on the

$100 plan. I spent about

$150 worth of Claude Code tokens over

the course of about 3 days. If there's a

common complaint of Claude Code, it is

it's very expensive. So, I was very

excited to see Claude Code use bundled

in with Claude Max. I don't even know if

I got through half of the pro tips that

are included in this post. If you want

to learn more, uh, check out this

excellent post here by Boris and check

out some of the other links that I left

below in the description.