My Claude Code config now holds two hooks, ten skills, and three custom subagents, and most of them started life in the wrong layer. The instruction the model followed nine times out of ten lived in a prompt until I accepted that nine out of ten is a coin I lose every day. The workflow I pasted into chats became a skill. The bulk work that was draining my priciest model's quota became a fleet of cheaper agents. Same features, different failure modes. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 6 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS The four layers # Claude Code has four extension points, and they answer four different questions:
I run four or more Claude Code agents at once, and until recently they all shared one working tree. Two agents editing the same repo means one of them eventually builds against the other's half-finished changes. Git worktrees fix that cleanly. What nobody warned me about is that the fix multiplies a different problem I already had: forgetting which folder a session lives in. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 5 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS The symptom # With several agents in one directory, the working tree is shared mutable state. Agent A refactors a partial, agent B runs the build, and B’s “failure” is really A’s work in flight. I had been dodging this by scoping agents to different subdirectories, which works until it does not.
In Part 1 we learned that named sessions are easy to find. Now let's make naming automatic with a hook. This is also a perfect first hook project, so I'll explain the whole idea from scratch. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 2 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux Part 1 left us with one chore: you still have to remember to name your sessions. Let’s delete that chore.
You're deep in a great Claude Code conversation. You close the terminal. The next day you want to pick up where you left off… and you can't find it. Sound familiar? Let's fix that. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 1 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux What is a “session,” and where does it go? # Every time you run claude, you start a session, one conversation, with its full history. When you quit, that history doesn’t vanish. Claude Code saves it to disk, organized per project folder, here:
Once you're comfortable with AI coding agents, you start running several at once: one refactoring here, one writing tests there, one stuck waiting for your approval. Keeping them straight is its own little skill. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 4 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux Here are two ways to do it: a lightweight tmux plugin, and (briefly) dedicated “AI terminal” apps.
If you use tmux, you've hit this: ten windows open and they're all named `zsh` or `node`. Which one had your AI agent running? No idea. Let's make tmux label windows usefully. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 3 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux New to tmux? It’s a “terminal multiplexer”: it splits one terminal into many windows and panes that survive disconnects. The only vocabulary you need here: a window is like a browser tab inside tmux; the bar at the bottom lists them. The prefix is the key you press before a tmux command, commonly Ctrl+b (mine is Ctrl+a). Why everything is named zsh # By default tmux has a setting called automatic-rename turned on. It renames each window after whatever program is running in it. A shell? zsh. A Node program (like Claude Code)? node. Helpful in theory, useless when everything collapses to the same word.
The hype says anyone can code now. The reality: vibe coding changes *what* senior engineers do, not *whether* we're needed. And the gap between experienced and inexperienced developers is getting wider, not narrower. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” their Word of the Year for 2025. Search interest spiked over 6,000%. The narrative is seductive: describe what you want, AI writes the code, programming becomes as easy as having a conversation.
Claude Code calls a custom statusline command every turn with a JSON payload on stdin. The payload includes the current context-window fill percentage, model, cost, and cwd. Nothing in the contract says you can only read it, and you can fork it to anything you want while the command stays a statusline. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 4 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Quick framing for anyone new to Claude Code: it’s Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude, and the statusline is the configurable line of text it prints under your prompt every turn, like a shell prompt for the agent. You point at any script in settings.local.json, Claude pipes a JSON object to it on stdin, and whatever the script writes to stdout becomes the visible line.)
I wrote a daemon to listen to Claude Code hooks. My first version read `$CLAUDE_HOOK_PAYLOAD` and logged empty bodies for two days straight. The payload was sitting on stdin the whole time. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 1 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS This post is the five gotchas I hit while wiring up ClaudeDeck, a Stream Deck plugin (a small program that runs inside Elgato’s Stream Deck app on the USB grid of programmable LCD keys) that talks to Claude Code over its hooks system. Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude (claude in your shell), and its hooks are user-defined scripts it spawns at certain points in a session (before a tool call, on session start, on prompt submit). My daemon is a long-running background process the plugin and the hooks both talk to over a local socket. None of the gotchas are exotic. All of them cost me hours. Each one is a place where the docs were either silent, ambiguous, or contradicted by tribal knowledge I picked up from other people’s projects.
I rebuilt my portfolio site in a weekend using vibe coding with Claude Code . This is the real workflow, no hype, with honest tradeoffs. Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” in early 2025. The pitch: describe what you want in natural language, let the AI write the code, spend your time directing instead of typing. Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year. Most takes on it are either breathless hype or dismissive eye-rolls. Here’s what it looks like when a senior engineer uses it for a real project.
I built a Claude Code permission gate that holds an HTTP response open until a Stream Deck key is pressed. Then I needed to inject a keystroke into Claude Code's own TTY so a key press could write `1\r` straight into Claude's stdin. Bun can hold HTTP open all day. Bun cannot reliably wrap a child PTY through `node-pty` and capture the parent shell's PID. So I split my daemon: HTTP and WebSocket stay on Bun, and a Node CommonJS subprocess owns the PTY that runs Claude. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 7 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Quick grounding before the story: a PTY (pseudo-terminal) is the kernel object every interactive shell talks to. It’s a pair of file descriptors, master and slave; the program reads/writes the slave end as if it were a real terminal, and anything you write to the master end looks to that program like a human typing. The TTY is the slave end seen from the child’s side. node-pty is Microsoft’s library that gives a JavaScript parent process a writable handle to the master. Bun is a JavaScript runtime, Node’s faster sibling, and Node CommonJS is plain old require()-based Node, no transpile step. The story below is about which runtime owns the PTY.)
My daemon logged 111 consecutive HTTP 429s against `https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage` over an 18-hour stretch, with zero successful responses ever in its lifetime. The poller was reading `Retry-After: 272` and ignoring it. While I was arguing with the backoff, Claude Code was pushing the same `rate_limits.five_hour` and `rate_limits.seven_day` numbers to my statusline command every turn, on stdin, for free. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 5 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Quick framing: Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude; Claude Max is the higher-tier subscription plan with weekly and 5-hour usage windows. HTTP 429 is “Too Many Requests”, the server’s polite way of saying “back off.” Retry-After is the response header that tells the client how long to wait. OAuth is the auth protocol Claude Code uses to talk to Anthropic on behalf of a logged-in user. And the statusline (the same one I covered in the statusline side-channel post) is the script Claude Code spawns every turn with a JSON blob on stdin.)