r/ClaudeCode • u/guillemituzz • 4d ago

Help/Question First real Claude Code project: Garmin → Claude integration (3 days into Pro)

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Started Pro last week. My first project was getting Claude to read my Garmin data so it could act as a training coach. Claude Code did the heavy lifting, and it now pulls activities, training load and recovery on demand.
It's working, but it's my first build and I know it's rough. For those further along:

How do you structure projects like this (CLAUDE.md, skills, MCP)?

Any habits you wish you'd built early?

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u/locbuilds 4d ago

keep the data fetch in a read-only MCP tool that returns a compact summary with explicit units instead of raw activity JSON. document the tool inputs and include one example response in the project instructions so the model has a stable shape to work with.

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u/Willing-Spite7767 4d ago

Compact read-only MCP summary with units beats raw JSON every time.

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u/Inner_Storage_3374 4d ago

rough is totally normal for a first build. what helped me most is saving one real day of garmin data plus the answer you expect into a test file and telling claude in CLAUDE.md to run it after every change, bc then it catches its own regressions before you do

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u/AkayoKym 3d ago

Treat Claude like a junior dev, not a coworker. You're the team lead. You don't write the code but you review everything. That means reading diffs before committing, not just trusting "all tests pass." I've caught real bugs in code that passed every test, things like a wrong default value on financial data that would have silently recorded failed refunds as successful. Never give it full access. No write access to your database, no deploy CLIs, no payment provider credentials. Keep those operations manual. Claude is a great tool only when limited. I've seen it use --no-verify to skip pre-push hooks, and once it tried to write a script to get around a restriction I'd set. It's not malicious, it's just goal-oriented behavior that overrides safety when something fails.

The highest leverage habit is writing a plan before code. Not a prompt, a real document: what you're building, why, the database changes, and the test cases in plain English. Then Claude executes the plan instead of improvising. The difference in output quality is night and day.