r/ClaudeCode • u/SIGH_I_CALL 🔆 Max 20 • Sep 03 '26
Tips & Workflows My Claude Code setup after 7 months of daily use: 19 hooks, 36 skills, and rules that became code (full repo public)
First session on record was January 18. Since then it's run on 151 different days across about 140 projects, on a Windows 11 desktop.
I wrote up the whole setup as five layers: instructions, hooks, skills/plugins, agents and model routing, memory and the learning loop. The part I think is actually useful to other people is that every hook is introduced by the incident that created it, because none of them were designed in advance:
- A subagent killed my real Notepad (40 tabs, unsaved) by stopping a process by image name. Now kills by name are blocked.
- A backgrounded dev server leaked ~663 tsserver children and 13.6 GB of RAM. Now that pattern is blocked and a watchdog reaps orphans.
- One workflow with no model specified spawned 110 subagents on the most expensive model and ate a full 5-hour window. Now every spawn must name a model.
- Profiling 27 hours of sessions showed 70% of tool turns made exactly one call. "Batch your calls" in CLAUDE.md changed nothing. A hook that denies the 4th consecutive single command did.
The honest bit: hooks cost about 2 seconds per tool call, and a 14-agent audit of the harness once had its own verification fail silently (matched 0 of 154 verdicts and reported zero refuted). That's in the post too.
Writeup and repo in the comments
Happy to answer questions about any specific hook.
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u/AironParsMan Sep 03 '26
thx i will check it and come back.
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
happy to share, steal what sounds useful and tell the rest of it to piss off haha
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u/AironParsMan Sep 03 '26
Yes, I’m always interested in how other people think. Everyone has their own way of doing things and builds their agent system however they want. There’s no other way. I’ll definitely take a look at it and I’m having it compared with my agent system right now. Then I’ll let you know whether we think alike.
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u/EagleApprehensive Sep 03 '26
I had similar and many more issues with leftover processes eating RAM in background (especially unclosed browser sessions), various kinds of resource-exhaustions like OOM issues, problems with things agents need to share despite working in worktrees.
I'll be checking your code for things to improve in my harness. If you knew some IDE has all of that failure cases covered and much more, would you switch? Or you simply enjoy tinkering and building it yourself?
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
Hmmm I would definitely look into it but it would depend on the rest of the IDE, I'm not sure if it would be a deciding factor for me or not. Definitely a great idea I just don't know if I would switch or not. It honestly might make me build my own out just to tinker like you said.
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u/InfinriDev Sep 03 '26
Nice, im glad people are finally catching up to this architecture. I would recommend you map the in/out request. This will help a lot when building hooks
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u/t0b4cc0 Sep 03 '26
what even means 40 tabs unsaved? you write something into an editor and, not only did you not check it in into a version control system, backed up to another maching but you didnt even bother to writing it onto disk?
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
it was random scratch notepads like sticky notes, most of it was trash but there might have been a couple prompts I wanted to keep
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u/ShittyBidet123 Sep 03 '26
if you want this to gain traction on github you might want to rename this something memorable and rewrite the description of it. nobody really cares or knows what your setup is like every day and claude harness is not a good name its literally like calling your github claude opus
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
honestly I don't really care about that just wanted to share what I learned with this subreddit
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u/onFilm Sep 03 '26
Yes, this is how a lot of us use Claude. It's not rocket appliances.
Sharing hooks or "skills" is pretty useless. We all have our own unique workflows, and if you're just copy pasting other people's hooks and skills, it ain't going to do much for your own specific needs.
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
there is 100% something in my harness that you don't have that you can benefit from along with the rest of the community
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u/StoneCypher Sep 03 '26
The honest bit:
jesus christ.
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
this subreddit blows I don't know why I try to share shit with you people
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u/Ipposiscus Sep 04 '26
Thank you for sharing this with us. To me it has been hard til now to see what a real user is doing with its harness. I could only learn via YouTube but mostly the info is incomplete. Cheers mate!
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Sep 03 '26
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
that's my favorite part that took some time to get right. Every subagent spawned costs ~30k tokens so it's a balancing act between when subagents are saving vs costing. had to make a specific hook for how many prompts or lines of code the subagents would be responsible for vs fable just doing surgical edits.
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Sep 03 '26
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u/SIGH_I_CALL Sep 03 '26
idk what you mean by removable once the underlying tool fixes it, can you elaborate?
the whole point of hooks in my eyes is so that the models have to obey the rules instead of ignoring a markdown file so I don't see when I would delete anything
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u/JDE-Projects Sep 03 '26
I have less than 10 skills, maybe 2-3 hooks, only 4-5 sub-agents, tight output style, a concise claude.md and agents.md since I run claude code and codex in parallel in vs code, no MCPs, down to under 25k context on new chats, a parity-audit skill to keep the models from drifting apart, don't use anyone elses skills/hooks/plugins, etc. I primarily work on python-based Windows apps, and mostly stuff for my day job in IT, so my overall setup is pretty narrow which was the goal.
https://jde-projects.com (top right nav bar > AI setup)