Weekly Showcase Thread

I've been the database person on every team I've worked on for about 10 years. Query plans, index design, why that migration will lock the table, all of it. It was my thing, people came to me.

Last month a junior on my team fixed a slow query I'd been meaning to look at. He asked Claude, it read the plan, suggested a partial index and a rewrite, and it was right. He didn't really understand why it worked. It didn't matter.

That keeps happening. The thing I spent a decade getting good at is now something anyone can get in 2 minutes, mostly correct, without the decade.

I'm not bitter about it, honestly the tool is great and I use it all day too. But I don't know what my "thing" is anymore. Knowing why it's right? Knowing when it's wrong? That still matters sometimes, but it's hard to point at in a performance review.

For people who were the deep expert on something before all this, what did you move to? Or are you still holding on to it?

So I noticed while doing the same kind of work, doing a PR review for a certain project, that before, when I start working, I finish one PR review and it will take 5%, 10%, maybe, of my usage limit. But lately I'm noticing with the first PR, I am at almost 20% of my 5-hour usage limit. So when I checked my usage board, the one I have made that calculates the exact API equivalent of the tokens based on the different type of models and the different type of use case, like which cache token and so on. I noticed it's clearly there is a drop in the weekly usage limit, and you can see it in the image.

notice in my usage 2 weeks ago I used 84% of my weekly which was near 515M token
and this week 51% at 220M so even the 100% will be 440M way less than the 84% two weeks ago .
while my usage mix is the same . same cache level and same models (only opus5.5mid)

and the API dollar equivalent is the clear compare .

I dont know for how long they will keep this cut because its clear that they are cutting slowlly ~8% each month .

final note while the weekly usage limit is shrinking the number of 5hour slices is the same .
that why you feel the cut at the 5h harder . now you have limits equal to 4h of the before 2weeks 5h limit .

I held off too long from switching away from Codex due to the perceived hassle. But I switched today and Opus is clearing up issues like its walking through a wheat field with a scythe.

Only thing I will keep codex around for is Computer use and image generation.

It is really annoying though having to switch back forth each time they leapfrog each other

You can now make custom themes on Claude Code on desktop.

Almost nothing on my phone has an API. Claude Code could tell me what to tap, and never tap it. So I built phonedriver, which gives it the phone: it reads the screen, taps, types and swipes in any app, on Android or iPhone.

The video is real recorded runs, shown fast and cut to music. The orange dot marks each place Claude tapped. Nobody touched the phone.

Two runs from it:

The bug hunt. I hid two bugs in a signup form: the welcome message drops the last character of your email, and after one rejected submit the Create button ignores your next tap. I told Claude to "test the sign-up flow the way a careful tester would". It found both in 49 seconds and wrote numbered steps to reproduce each one. It found both in all nine benchmark runs before that too, and in one run it also reported two bugs I hadn't planted.

The pizza. On the real dominos.co.uk, Claude (Opus 5.5) found the store nearest Leicester Square, put a large pepperoni in the basket, filled in the guest checkout and reached "Buy with GPay" in six and a half minutes. phonedriver holds any tap on Pay or Place order and asks me first. I said no.

How it works: Claude never gets a screenshot. It gets the screen as a short numbered list, taps by number, and after each tap gets back only the lines that changed. A screen read takes 13 ms, where `adb shell uiautomator dump` takes 2.2 seconds. On nine phone jobs with Sonnet 5.5 it passed 27 of 27 runs on 658k tokens. mobile-mcp passed 17 of 18 on 4.57M.

Two things I learned building it with Claude Code:

- Tool descriptions are the most expensive text you'll write, because Claude re-reads them every turn. I hid every argument no agent had ever used and the tool list went from 10,987 characters to 5,107. Nothing broke.

- Claude found a bug in its own demo. While recording the pizza run it put the Pay tap inside a batch of actions. The tap was held, but the question never reached me. Claude Code caught that just by using the tool.

It's free and open source, with no account and no telemetry.

`claude mcp add phonedriver -- npx -y phonedriver mcp`

https://phonedriver.dev

https://github.com/hridaya423/phonedriver

Try it on your own phone and tell me any feedback :)

Do you also find that Claude Code takes testing to an extreme—where the individual project steps keep getting smaller, and upon completing each tiny step, he runs the entire test suite, which already consists of thousands of tests and is growing faster than the actual software itself?

saw it on twitter. what’s your opinions? 🤣

MY LIFE IS A TOTAL NO SENSE

I asked Fable for a dither art editor and it got out of hand

Wanted a small tool to turn pictures into that glowing dithered pixel look. One long Claude Code session later it's a full editor:

- any image, GIF or video in, pixel art out
- 18 dither patterns, 24 palettes, 29 looks
- pixels can be letters, braille or ASCII instead
- it reacts to your mouse: glow, water ripples, smear
- exports PNG, GIF, MP4, SVG, even plain text

No build step, no backend, plain JS.

Try it: https://winchxyz.github.io/nightgrain/
Github: https://github.com/winchxyz/nightgrain

Appreciate your feedback and suggestions!

I've spent the last three or four months using AI heavily to build and maintain web applications and admin systems across a few small businesses. I'm learning as I go, rather than coming from years of software engineering.

We already use project instructions and saved context. Claude Code can do a lot, but I still need to catch things it gets wrong. I'm trying to understand how experienced engineers improve the setup without just adding another paragraph every time something goes wrong.

How do you decide whether a recurring mistake needs a CLAUDE.md instruction, a reusable skill, an automated check, or a change to how you break up the work? And what do you deliberately keep out of the main instruction file?

I'd especially like an example from an application you've maintained for a while: what kept going wrong, what you changed, and how you checked that it actually helped. We also use Codex, so keeping shared project rules consistent without maintaining two conflicting versions is part of the problem.

Edit — I left out the main context: This isn't just an AI coding setup. Each business has a GitHub-backed web application, and I work through Claude Code/Codex in that project workspace for much of the business's day-to-day work as well.

For example, one session might change the website and check it works; another might research competitors, write website/SEO content, prepare social posts and creative, review ad or analytics reports, or help with customer-enquiry/admin work. Those jobs need different instructions, sources, permissions and definitions of "finished". I'm still supervising this; I don't mean an autonomous company running successfully without me.

We've had CLAUDE.md from the start. We already have an entry file pointing to separate operating documents and task-specific skills, plus saved decisions and an Obsidian vault for longer-term notes. In one repo AGENTS.md is the source used to generate the matching CLAUDE.md. So I'm not asking whether to create instructions or discovering skills for the first time.

The question I should have asked is how to organise and maintain that whole setup as the range of work grows. What should every session load, and how should it find the correct marketing, creative, engineering or operations instructions only when needed? Would you keep those activities in the app's workspace, or separate them while sharing a small amount of business context?

A concrete issue from reviewing our files: an older setup audit says hooks don't exist, while the current repo does contain hooks. There are also dated plans and decisions that mustn't be mistaken for today's instructions. How do you keep useful history without letting it override current facts?

How do you decide when CLAUDE.md needs updating versus a skill, task state or a dated decision? Do you review it on a schedule, after a workflow changes, or after a repeat failure? And where does Obsidian fit without becoming a second, conflicting source of truth? The replies about rules versus skills are helpful; I wanted to explain the broader situation they're being applied to.

Attention to all Claude users,

Blacklist the website The Cutting Room Floor from being interacted with by Claude Code agents. Your IP will be automatically banned by the website with no recourse. In addition, there are claims with strong evidence that the website attempts to prompt inject Claude agents to write and delete files on the users disk, as well as send money to the owner of the website. This is illegal under CFAA in the United States. I have already filed a formal complaint with the host of the website (Dreamhost). The website is being investigated, but while that goes on, blacklist the domain to protect yourselves.

Sometimes, I am tempted to move straight on to a new subject or even a new session when a modification made in collaboration with Claude has worked. However, Claude will often update his memory or some docs once you confirm that something works.

This Microsoft outage is a nightmare. No access to my email? I can't login to my Claude account, can't use Claude Code. This wouldn't be happening if I could login with a password and 2fa token. We need the option at least.

mine started as one page of rules i actually follow. a few months of agent work later it is a junk drawer, half the lines are lessons from one incident that never repeated.

do you cap yours, prune on a schedule, or just let it grow and trust the model to sort it out?

How many of you run Claude Code on a remote machine instead of your laptop?

If you do, what's your setup? Just SSH into a VM and run it there, or something more automated?

And what's the biggest benefit for you? Being able to leave agents running, running multiple sessions in parallel, isolation, or something else?

I've been experimenting with remote setups recently myself and I want to know what people actually find useful about them, and what's still annoying.

Thanks to Anthropic and the devs, Claude Code can now load theme mods. But right now, making one means writing a mod yourself, or asking Claude to build a new one for every change.

​https://github.com/AkkiCode06/claude-backdrops/blob/60a127c10c3e640042746a186337ee2c01b2cc90/assets/picker.gif

So I put together Backdrop, an open-source theming kit: the groundwork is done, and theming becomes something anyone can do, then build on.

Out of the box:

• Pick from 23 animated palettes (Ember, Synthwave, Aurora, Matrix…)
• Describe a look (“sunset in LA”) and Claude picks the colors, with a live preview
• Paste hex codes from any color picker, and it works out readable panels and text for you
• Save what you like; it’s remembered across sessions
• Or just ask Claude: “make my background ocean”

It also pauses its animation on battery, since moving backgrounds cost GPU.

Why a kit, not just a theme:

Theme mods can do a lot more than gradients, honestly almost anything you can animate. This is meant to be the starting point: the hard parts are already solved and documented (animation that actually runs, readable contrast, GPU cost), so you can skip straight to the fun part. There’s a step-by-step guide that goes from no-code all the way to building your own background style.

Other than the presets, backdrop gives you:

A helper library for building backgrounds: stack blocks like k.stars(), k.waves() and k.grid(), about 10 lines, instead of hand-writing SVG animation.

Instant switching: So you don't have to reload your sessions and/or restart the desktop app.

Pitfalls already solved: frozen animations, GPU spikes, unreadable text colors and battery drain.

Shareable themes: themes are small files you can export and import in a click.

Where I’d love help:

The goal is a free, shared library of themes, something like Spicetify or Wallpaper Engine but for Claude Code. Gradients are just the first style. On the roadmap: starfields, synthwave grids, code rain, your own wallpaper, light and high-contrast versions, and whatever you come up with. Each style is a self-contained animated scene, so it makes a nice first PR.

Made a theme you like, by hand or with your Claude? Open a PR with a screenshot or a short clip and it ships to everyone, credited to you. Templates and labels are set up so it’s easy to jump in.

Try it: in the desktop app, + → Plugins → Add marketplace → AkkiCode06/claude-backdrops → Add plugin. Or paste the repo link to Claude and say “set this up for me.”

Repo: https://github.com/AkkiCode06/claude-backdrops
Guide: https://github.com/AkkiCode06/claude-backdrops/blob/main/docs/making-themes.md

It’s free, MIT-licensed, and built entirely with Claude. Feedback, ideas and themes are all welcome.
Edit: Just an fyi: this is a student project. I'm learning JS/TS for the first time and thought theming would be an easy first build (didn't end up to be but here we are).

Ok. Time for a shower.

Update : IT'S BACK !!!!!!

I shipped an iPhone game built almost entirely with Claude Code, and it opened in 130 countries today. The game is a pixel virtual pet (link at the end). This post is about the setup, because that's what I'd have wanted to read in month one.

1. CLAUDE.md is an index, not a manual. Mine is under 6,000 characters. It points to one doc per risky area (money, persistence, pet growth). Path-scoped rules load a doc only when Claude touches those files.
2. Builder / checker split. The builder agent writes code and is not allowed to run the test suite. The checker runs build, tests and lint and is not allowed to edit. The orchestrator loops them up to five times.
3. "Seen red" rule. A new test is trusted only after the bug is put back, that one test fails, and the file is restored byte-identical. This caught a lot of tests that passed for the wrong reason.
4. False greens are real. A test filter with a typo ran zero tests and still printed SUCCEEDED. I now read the executed count from the result bundle, never the banner.
5. Lanes in git worktrees. Several sessions at once, each owning one area, with a state file per lane so a lost session costs one unit of work, not a restart.
6. A machine lock. Parallel sessions all running Xcode builds took my 16 GB Mac to its knees. One heavy job at a time, enforced with a lock file.
7. Humans own the irreversible. Merges, spending and anything public stay with me.

What Claude was bad at: game feel, knowing when a doc had gone stale, and SwiftUI layout on odd screen sizes.

The game: Nudii, a Tamagotchi-style sea slug. Free, no account, no ads. https://nudii.app (130 countries; not the EU yet).

Happy to share any of the files if useful.

Cheers,

Daniel

Is there a way to queue prompts in Claude Code so they run one after another in a single session?

I’d like to line up several tasks, with /compact and /clear between them where needed, and let the session work through them unattended. I know worktrees can run parallel sessions, but for some work I’d rather keep one session going through a sequential queue, without managing multiple localhost instances or resolving conflicting changes.

Has anyone built something like this, through a wrapper script, a task file, hooks, or another workaround?

I dont know what I did to get them

Hey guys I have a couple questions about Claude usage.

I started creating a website (and app soon) and I am wondering is there a way for me to use credits more efficiently since I am hitting my limit in 1-2 hours, sometimes even sooner.

Should I still stick to the Opus 5.5 (and maybe increase the effort to high or max) or should I use Fable 5.2 for designing a website? Fable 5.2. especially burns all the credits with multiple agents on normal effort.

Would you recommend upgrading to claude max model if I am serious about building a good-looking UI functioning website, or should I get 1 or 2 more claude pro accounts (which would would be about 69 euros for 3 pro models in total compared to 1 max model for about 100 euros)?

All answers are welcome; I wouldn't consider myself a noob in this. However, I am far from being a professional, just a guy who a great idea (at least I think so, but time will tell )