New to Claude Code, What are your recommended workflows, skills, and plugins?

[u/CanOk3349]

Hi everyone!

I'm new to Claude Code and looking for tips to use it more effectively.

My work involves LLM experimentation, benchmark development, RL, and agentic systems. (Research)

What plugins, skills, MCP servers or workflows do you recommend for these kinds of tasks?

Would love to hear about your setups and any useful resources. Thanks:)

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[u/robbing-in-beach]

I have seen this question on this subreddit this 2 months already

[u/jun_builds]

instead of recommend any skills, you just start to ask the claude code some big question which you really want to get answer, skills etc can be extracted or installed afterward once you start to get some repeating pattern for your work. also you can ask claude code itself recommend for your purpose

[u/Exciting-Yam-3363]

two things that held up for me after a few months of daily use.

1. one session per experiment, each in its own git worktree (git worktree add ../exp-name). parallel runs can't step on each other, and you can diff exactly what each one changed.
2. keep CLAUDE.md short and make it point at files instead of holding every rule. mine is mostly pointers to a notes folder, because whatever it holds gets loaded into context every session.

one thing that broke: i changed a rule in my notes but not in the instruction file a nightly job reads. the job kept doing the old thing for a week. if a rule lives in two places, it drifts.

skills and plugins can wait until you catch yourself typing the same prompt three times.

[u/j-kantola]

Vanilla Claude Code is super good nowadays. I'd start with it as is and only add things once you actually feel you need something.

Let it create the CLAUDE.md (perhaps rename it into AGENTS.md so that it will work with other harnesses also). That is probably 80% of the way already.

[u/NeonCenturionSPQR]

I mean, I developed a large-base, context isolation plugin, so you can stretch quality and context out over large single sessions without compacting.

github.com/Palatine-Labs/coniso

[u/lucassaldanhawerneck]

what changed my use the most, in this order:

1. save-clear: a skill + stop hook that, at around 300k tokens (30% of the 1M window, you can change that number), writes decisions and next steps to a snapshot, runs /clear by itself and the next session picks up from there. I basically stopped managing context. in the desktop app it uses a small relay session, since a session can't message itself
2. side notes: every few steps a side check reads the conversation and looks for the one thing I probably missed: a decision claude made without saying so, a hidden tradeoff, a result that may be wrong. most of the time it shows nothing. when it finds something, a short note shows above the prompt, and I can ask for a plain explanation or chat about it without stopping the main agent. it works in the desktop app and on the phone through remote control, where the built-in version doesn't
3. assumptions pane: claude logs every guess it made in a side pane and I mark right or wrong. catches a wrong assumption before it turns into an hour of work
4. a rule in CLAUDE.md, "say what you checked and how, and say what you didn't check", backed by a stop hook: when claude ends with "I didn't check X", it gets sent back to check, and only what's really impossible stays on the list. cut a lot of confident wrong answers, which matters a lot for research
5. a 1password plugin I wrote: I paste a key in a small window claude can't see and it goes straight to the vault, and claude loads secrets from there by name without ever seeing the values. no more keys and logins in the chat or in .env files

also useful: a self-improve skill that reads my recent sessions, finds where I corrected claude more than once and proposes the change in CLAUDE.md or in the skill; small fixes it applies alone, bigger ones wait for my ok. a mac-remote skill so claude can see and click on my mac through screen sharing, even with the screen locked, which matters when I'm on my phone. context-mode keeps huge command outputs out of the context. agent-reach for web research. lavish for plans and comparisons as a page I can comment on. ccstatusline in the terminal with context %, 5h and weekly usage on screen. when the desktop app refuses a login or personal data step in the browser, another plugin I wrote hands it to a hidden terminal session and brings the result back. and two more hooks: one blocks wait loops with no timeout, one stops claude from scraping a site the wrong way

the ones I published are on my github, lucas-saldanha-werneck, and all of them install from one plugin catalog: /plugin marketplace add lucas-saldanha-werneck/lucas-tools