Comment by Yoric
3 days ago
You intrigue me.
> have it learn your conventions, pull in best practices
What do you mean by "have it learn your conventions"? Is there a way to somehow automatically extract your conventions and store it within CLAUDE.md?
> For example, we have a custom UI library, and Claude Code has a skill that explains exactly how to use it. Same for how we write Storybooks, how we structure APIs, and basically how we want everything done in our repo. So when it generates code, it already matches our patterns and standards out of the box.
Did you have to develop these skills yourself? How much work was that? Do you have public examples somewhere?
> What do you mean by "have it learn your conventions"?
I'll give you an example: I use ruff to format my python code, which has an opinionated way of formatting certain things. After an initial formatting, Opus 4.5, without prompting, will write code in this same style so that the ruff formatter almost never has anything to do on new commits. Sonnet 4.5 is actually pretty good at this too.
Isn't this a meaningless example? Formatters already exist. Generating code that doesn't need to be formatted is exactly the same as generating code and then formatting it.
I care about the norms in my codebase that can't be automatically enforced by machine. How is state managed? How are end-to-end tests written to minimize change detectors? When is it appropriate to log something?
Here's an example:
We have some tests in "GIVEN WHEN THEN" style, and others in other styles. Opus will try to match each style of testing by the project it is in by reading adjacent tests.
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The second part is what I'd also like to have.
But I think it should be doable. You can tell it how YOU want the state to be managed and then have it write a custom "linter" that makes the check deterministic. I haven't tried this myself, but claude did create some custom clippy scripts in rust when I wanted to enforce something that isn't automatically enforced by anything out there.
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Memes write themselves.
"AI has X"
"We have X at home"
"X at home: x"
Starting to use Opus 4.5 I'm reduces instrutions in claude.md and just ask claude to look in the codebase to understand the patterns already in use. Going from prompts/docs to instead having code being the "truth". Show don't tell. I've found this patterns has made a huge leap with Opus 4.5.
The Ash framework takes the approach you describe.
From the docs (https://hexdocs.pm/ash/what-is-ash.html):
"Model your application's behavior first, as data, and derive everything else automatically. Ash resources center around actions that represent domain logic."
I feel like I've been doing this since Sonnet 3.5 or Sonnet 4. I'll clone projects/modules/whatever into the working directory and tell claude to check it out. Voila, now it knows your standards and conventions.
Just ask it to.
/init in Claude Code already automatically extracts a bunch, but for something more comprehensive, just tell it which additional types of things you want it to look for and document.
> Did you have to develop these skills yourself? How much work was that? Do you have public examples somewhere?
I don't know about the person above, but I tell Claude to write all my skills and agents for me. With some caveats, you can do this iteratively in a single session ("update the X agent, then re-run it. Repeat until it reliably does Y")
When I ask Claude to do something, it independently, without me even asking or instructing it to, searches the codebase to understand what the convention is.
I’ve even found it searching node_modules to find the API of non-public libraries.
This sounds like it would take a huge amount of tokens. I've never used agents so could you disclose how much you pay for it?
I use the $200/month Claude Code plan, and in the last week I've had it generate about half a million words of documentation without hitting any session limits.
I have hit the weekly limit before, briefly, but that took running multiple sessions in parallel continuously for many days.
If they're using Opus then it'll be the $100/month Claude Max 5x plan (could be the more expensive 20x plan depending on how intensive their use is). It does consume a lot of tokens, but I've been using the $100/mo plan and get a lot done without hitting limits. It helps to be mindful of context (regularly amending/pruning your CLAUDE.md instructions, clearing context between tasks, sizing your tasks to stay within the Opus context window). Claude Code plans have token limits that work in 5-hour blocks (that start when you send your first token, so it's often useful to prime it as early in the morning as possible).
Claude Code will spawn sub-agents (that often use their cheap Haiki model) for exploration and planning tasks, with only the results imported into the main context.
I've found the best results from a more interactive collaboration with Claude Code. As long as you describe the problem clearly, it does a good job on small/moderate tasks. I generally set two instances of Claude Code separate tasks and run them concurrently (the interaction with Claude Code distracts me too much to do my own independent coding simultaneously like with setting a task for a colleague, but I do work on architecture / planning tasks)
The one manner of taste that I have had to compromise on is the sheer amount of code - it likes to write a lot of code. I have a better experience if I sweat the low-level code less, and just periodically have it clean up areas where I think it's written too much / too repetitive code.
As you give it more freedom it's more prone to failure (and can often get itself stuck in a fruitless spiral) - however as you use it more you get a sense of what it can do independently and what's likely to choke on. A codebase with good human-designed unit & playwright tests is very good.
Crucially, you get the best results where your tasks are complex but on the menial side of the spectrum - it can pay attention to a lot of details, but on the whole don't expect it to do great on senior-level tasks.
To give you an idea, in a little over a month "npx ccusage" shows that via my Claude Code 5x sub I've used 5M input tokens, 1.5M output, 121M Cache Create, 1.7B Cache Read. Estimated pay-as-you-go API cost equivalent is $1500 (N.B. for the tail end of December they doubled everybody's API limits, so I was using a lot more tokens on more experimental on-the-fly tool construction work)
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"Claude, clone this repo https://github.com/repo, review the coding conventions, check out any markdown or readme files. This is an example of coding conventions we want to use on this project"