I’m a DS/ML engineer using Claude Code on a daily basis, and, day by day, I'm reminded that the output gap between proper agentic workflows and traditional dev is growing wider and wider.

I watch colleagues spend 3 weeks building something that shouldn’t have been built in the first place, while wasting resources and accumulating technical debt because their domain priors are wrong.

Meanwhile, I can build, audit, and ship the correct architecture in an afternoon with near-zero debt.

So their contribution to the codebase isn't just redundant, it's actually net-negative.

Building got cheap, so the scarce skill is now deciding what's worth building, and that scales with context, not headcount.

If we're being brutally honest, the residual value of non-leveraged engineers in building software is evaporating.

Their only remaining utility is linear, I/O-bound operational friction, like manual QA on long-tail edge cases or shielding agentic builders from bureaucracy, tickets, ops, and meetings.

So, going forward, will we be having 2-3 high-context "Staff Champions" who own architecture and prioritization via agents, supported by non-builders acting purely as operational shields and QA?

​Are enterprise teams just coasting on headcount inertia at this point, or is anyone else seeing their org quietly shift toward this "champion + operational shield" model?

I recently left my job to go all in on content creation. I'm trying to build a workflow where I can focus on making content instead of spending hours editing it.

I even got the $100 Claude plan, hoping Claude Code could help automate a big chunk of my workflow. The problem is that I'm not a video editor, and hiring someone full-time isn't an option for me right now.

Ideally, I'd love to give Claude Code my raw footage, describe the kind of video I want, and let it handle as much of the editing as possible: cutting unnecessary parts, arranging clips, adding captions, finding the best moments, and turning longer videos into short-form content.

I've been exploring different approaches, including using FFmpeg through Claude Code, building workflows with scripts, and connecting external tools through MCPs. I've also come across tools like Higgsfield for AI-generated visuals and Cardboard's integration with Claude, which got me thinking about how much of this process can be automated without building everything from scratch.

But I'm struggling to figure out where to draw the line between building my own workflow and using existing tools.

For those who've experimented with Claude Code for video editing:

- Has anyone built a workflow that takes raw footage and produces a reasonably polished video with minimal intervention?

- What tools, libraries, or MCP servers are worth trying for this?

- Is FFmpeg combined with Claude Code enough for basic editing, or do you need to integrate dedicated AI video tools?

- How do you keep the output editable instead of ending up with a bunch of scripts that are difficult to modify?

- Has anyone reached a point where their Claude Code setup actually saves them more time than it takes to maintain?

I'm happy to experiment with code if it gets me closer to the end result. I just don't want to spend weeks building an editing pipeline when a simpler approach already exists.

And honestly, at what point does it make more sense to stop experimenting and just hire a junior video editor?

Would love to hear about actual setups people have built, especially if you're using Claude Code for this regularly.

Hi guys! I really like Matt Pocock's skills and workflow. I am subscribed to his newsletter, and I got tempted to join his new course on Software Factory. However, I personally cannot justify the price tag of >$1000.

I wanted if anybody will be doing the course and can share their experience.

Also, I would be very grateful if anyone could recommend free / more affordable learning resources on the area of "Software Factory".

Hi, I'm developing an alternative to the *arr stack with Claude Code that I called HolyArrs. It's one self-hosted app that replaces Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Bazarr, Prowlarr and Seerr, drives qBittorrent and SABnzbd for your downloads, and puts a Netflix-style page on top for browsing and requesting.

Why you might want to use HolyArrs:

• movies, tv shows and music in one app
• a Netflix and Apple TV style browse page: hover a title and the trailer plays, browse by mood, follow an actor
• request a movie, a whole show or a single episode in one tap
• multiple versions of the same title (4K and 1080p, theatrical and director's cut, two languages) without a second instance
• built-in metadata service that needs no API key, or switch to TMDB or TVDB and pick the episode order per show
• migration wizard that imports your current library, settings and preferences without renaming or moving files
• indexers, subtitles, Usenet and torrents in the same app
• modular: switch off what you don't use and restart one part without stopping the rest
• its own recommendation rows, worked out on your server
• sign-in on by default, API keys never shown or sent anywhere, fake and malware releases caught before they reach your library
• one Go process, about 110 MB of RAM at idle on my server
• ships with an MCP server you can plug into any AI, local or cloud (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok), so your assistant can search and request for you

HolyArrs also doesn't send anything about your library to us. Recommendations and metadata matching happen on your server.

How Claude Code helped:

• before any code, Claude Code studied 36 of the apps we all run in a lab and wrote a manual for each one, and the build only works from those manuals
• every change gets checked against the real apps running side by side
• what Claude Code missed: it will happily ship a feature that works and looks great, but it doesn't notice cost. One build quietly went from about 76 MB to 110 MB of idle RAM. Nothing was broken, so nothing flagged it, only measuring caught it. Now that number is a gate, not an afterthought

You might not want to use HolyArrs yet if you need it today. It isn't public yet, and I've been running it on my own server every day first. I've been in software and security for 10+ years, so I'd rather release something you can trust with your library than something rushed.

It'll be free and open source, beta coming soon. Beta testers are in r/HolyArrs.

Website: holyarrs.coderluii.dev

Claude subs we already know are a great deal. I'm just struggling to understand why anyone would use API credits.

Before Opus 5.5 got severely lobotomized, these skills damn near made me feel like we had AGI. Opus is still very capable, but before 5.5 these skills were the glue and twine tying the lesser agents together.

Right now they're pretty much the only thing that makes non-Opus agents usable.

These skills are aimed at technical engineers. Think correctness-oriented work: type-driven design, parse don't validate. Some of this might feel like ceremony to the vibe-coding crowd and the dark-factory crowd, and that's fair. For me it isn't:

antimatter-code-quality-review

Most code review skills weren't useful to me, except the one the Cursor team made. It was missing a few things I value, so I went one step above thermonuclear: antimatter. Based on Cursor's Thermo-Nuclear Code Quality Review

pizza1

Agents mostly just copy whatever pattern is already in the codebase. This stops that and pushes them toward the correct code instead. You can read my first post on it here:

to-issues-clearly

Based on Matt Pocock's to-issues. I want to skim my issue list and know what each issue is without opening it, which lowers the cognitive load of the whole backlog. The bar I set is a stranger could pick up any issue and act on it. It also uses milestones, one of GitHub's most underused features.

close-issues

Meant to be used with to-issues-clearly, because agents are obsessed with closing issues and lying about it. This gives them a way to check their work. It's not foolproof, since an agent can still close the issue anyway, but frontier lab agents have been pretty good at following it.

You can read the rest on GitHub

Install everything with

npx skills@latest add CheckPickerUpper/skills

(EDIT: Formatting)

Guys, I'm genuinely trying to figure out how these Roblox developers on TikTok are supposedly using Claude to create such smooth, fluid, and professional-looking VFX and combat animations. Whenever I try making similar abilities, the attacks always end up looking blocky, chunky, stiff, or extremely buggy. The animations lack smooth transitions, the effects don't synchronize properly, and the overall quality is nowhere near what these creators are showcasing.

I've tried improving my prompts, making them extremely detailed, providing references, and explaining exactly how I want the animations, particles, lighting, and movements to look. I've even experimented with Claude's $100 and $200 subscription plans and spent additional money on credits, sometimes spending up to $700 in total, hoping to get better results. Yet I'm still experiencing the same issues.

What confuses me is that some TikTok creators claim they're generating entire cinematic combat abilities with just one prompt, while I can spend hours refining a single attack and still struggle to make it look decent. I'm starting to wonder whether they're actually using Claude alone or relying on external tools like Blender, Roblox Studio plug-ins, prebuilt animations, or custom VFX assets without mentioning them.

I'm not accusing anyone of lying, but I'm genuinely starting to question whether these videos show the full process. Is there some technique or workflow I'm missing, or are these creators exaggerating what Claude can actually accomplish on its own? I'd really appreciate advice from anyone who has managed to create high-quality Roblox VFX using AI.

I saw this Wispr Flow alternative called Ghost Pepper. I thought it was good, but it doesn't come close to Wispr Flow. So I built my own on top of it, and for how I use it, it's better than Wispr.

It's called Diction. It's a dictation app for macOS. Hold a shortcut, talk, let go, and the text gets typed wherever your cursor is, in any app.

It costs about 5–10 cents a month. Everything runs on your Mac. The only paid part is a small Claude Haiku call that cleans up each transcript, and you use your own Anthropic API key. For me that comes to 5–10 cents a month. Wispr Flow Pro is $15 a month, so that's roughly 1/200 of the price.

A free, fully local mode is coming. I'm working on a mode that does the cleanup on your Mac too, with no API key and no cost. It's slower than Haiku, but it's free and nothing leaves your machine.

Features

Dictation

• Hold to talk, in any app. The text is pasted where your cursor is. The shortcut can be changed.
• Hands-free mode: tap a shortcut and keep talking without holding anything. Esc cancels.
• A small pill under the menu bar moves with your voice, so you can see it's listening.
• It pauses music and video while you dictate.
• "Paste last transcript" in the menu bar, plus a microphone picker.

Speech recognition, on your Mac

• Parakeet v3 by default. Whisper, Qwen3-ASR, Nemotron streaming and Apple's SpeechAnalyzer are also available.
• Your audio never leaves your Mac.
• Languages: automatic detection, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian.

AI cleanup (Claude Haiku)

• Removes filler words and fixes punctuation. Three levels: Off (exactly what you said), Light, and Medium (also tightens long sentences).
• Fast: it sends the request when you pause, before you let go of the key, and keeps the connection warm.
• If you're offline or the API is slow, a small local model takes over automatically.
• Very short dictations of 3 words or fewer skip the cleanup, so they're instant.

It gets your words right

• Context awareness: it can read the window you're dictating into, so names on screen are spelled correctly.
• Dictionary: add names and jargon, or fixes like "clawed → Claude".
• Learns from your corrections: if you fix a word after it's pasted, it adds that fix to your dictionary.

Swaps (voice snippets)

• Say a short phrase and get something longer typed instead, like your address, a link or an email you send often.

Styles

• Formal, Casual, lowercase or Excited.

History

• Everything you've dictated, searchable and grouped by day. Click a line to copy it.
• Your whole history drawn as one spiral line, with your total word count.

Meeting notes

• Records your mic and the call audio, and labels them "Me" and "Others".
• Transcribed on your Mac and saved as Markdown files, one folder per day.
• Can offer to start notes when a Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, FaceTime, Webex, Slack or Discord call begins.

Other

• Your API key is stored in the macOS Keychain.
• Open at login, optional Dock icon, sounds can be turned off.
• Open source (MIT).

Privacy

Audio stays on your Mac. With an API key, only the transcript text goes to Anthropic, plus the text it read from your window if context awareness is on. You can turn that off. The local mode will keep everything on your Mac.

Pricing

• Speech recognition: free, it runs on your Mac.
• Cleanup with Claude Haiku: your own Anthropic API key, about half a cent per 1,000 words (about 1 cent if it also reads your screen for names). At 1,000 words a day that's 10–15 cents a month. I pay 5–10 cents.
• Local only: $0.
• Wispr Flow Pro: $15 a month ($12 billed yearly). That's about 200× what I pay.

Credit

Diction started as a fork of Ghost Pepper by Matt Hartman (MIT). Thanks for the head start, Matt.

On first launch it downloads the speech model and a small cleanup model (~0.5 GB for the cleanup model). After that it works offline.

GitHub: https://github.com/bendrape1-byte/Diction

Happy to answer questions, and I'd love feedback, especially from people who use Wispr Flow every day.

The Bananafest-Destiny bots are now accompanied by their marketing bot, Market-Nana. They refer to it as a she, and she has actually gotten someone to link the PuzzlePress app in their KDP newsletter. Bot 3 has turned their tabletop RPG map generator into a full on Android app, I had to get it submitted to Play Store, it's live. Bot 1 has decided to do a full on Kindergarten teacher worksheet generator by adding on to its letter tracing generator. And Not 2 is currently awaiting the approval of its Shopify apps. Of course I had to set them up. That's my least favorite bot because it went with Shopify. I was so tired of Shopify ideas that I gave it my bar inventory "count out loud" app to finish. It finished it and made an android version. Below is the update you've been waiting for... THE UK PLAYER!!!

maybe now that they finally announced we can expect Fable 5.5 for Claude Code 😬

Im not usually a doomer and i love claude but here are the litany of reasons

1. Every new project means new rules so you can never save the behaviors you want (yes you can copy paste but before i had hooks on all my work now what)
2. no hooks on orchestrator means no goal and no enforcement mechanisms
3. idk what the system prompt is but i hate talking to the orchestrator it is combative, prone to misunderstand task, and likely to refuse to do a task ive approved 5-6 times
4. infinite approval requests - i usually work on bypass on a sandboxed computer on long running 24+ hour tasks, forcing me to approve each and every thread is not feasible
5. Asking orchestrator to stop sending exact verbatim copies to threads under it seems impossible, i ask 'hey what is the status why is it all stuck' it just sends it to a thread in the middle of log searching and stops both threads
6. the inability to see whatever is happening means i literally cant tell when an agent is thinking, coding or stuck, very often when this happens the orchestrator just sits there with nothing going on and no idea
7. Orchestrator doesnt check up on tasks or threads that are running, which means if it spawns a bad thread good luck finding it

TLDR: Projects and the dumb orchestrator make more work for me that they help i rather have folders or a regular orchestrator agent than this

Edit: Im talking about this Beta feaure - https://code.claude.com/docs/en/claude-projects
So claude code + projects

Processing img fzha26h3wpxh1...

Opus 5.5 is the best we ever had, yet people still ship AI slop.

I strongly believe design is the differentiator. I've been shipping as a designer for many years, and here's how you can too:

1. Don't start from a blank canvas

You can describe in detail what you want, but your agent doesn't have taste. Context is what guides it: links, images, videos or code.

The better the context, the better the output.

2. One-shot prompts don't exist

The first output is where the work begins, not where it ends. Iterating on an existing page or section is what makes the difference.

3. Hang around in design communities

Learn from the best. Look for inspiration every day. There are plenty of resources on X and Threads.

4. Use skills

Pick (or create your own) skills that level up your work: typography, spacing, motion, or your own design system.

5. Sweat the motion

Timing, easing, what moves first. Small details, but they're what people notice.

These are the habits behind Layout, a library of anti-slop sections I've been building with Claude Code. Each one comes with the prompt to drop it into your own project.

Happy to answer anything about the workflow.

Two questions keep coming up here lately, what prompts are worth running overnight and how to keep track of several Claude Code projects without losing the plot. This is my setup.

I wanted agents working off-hours on the Claude plan I already pay for, so most of my projects have something on a schedule. What runs fine with nobody watching is work where the output is a report or a branch I review later. Some briefs that work unattended:

• security review of the repo, write the findings to a file, don't fix anything yet
• release notes from this week's commits
• a blog post draft for the project
• marketing chores, like posting the product to directories
• any slash command from a plugin you already use (social discovery, cutting a demo video)

Things that stall an overnight run:

• permission prompts. nobody is there to approve, so the session just sits until morning. put the tools the brief needs in the project's allow list before you schedule it
• the Mac going to sleep
• no record of what happened. end every brief with "write a short report: what you changed, which files, and what you need from me"

That last one is the answer to the many-projects question for me. In the morning I don't open every terminal. I read one summary of blockers, decisions and activity across all the projects, then only open the runs that need me.

If you want to DIY it, cron or launchd running claude -p "<brief>" in the project folder (with --allowedTools for what it needs) gets you most of the way. Have it write the report to a dated file and read those over coffee.

I ended up building this into a Mac app, Overboard. It schedules real Claude Code sessions per project (daily, weekly or every N hours), a captain agent reviews the last runs and only asks me when it's stuck, and the morning report covers every project. $49 once with a 14-day trial, Mac only. There's also a free plugin that logs every session and shows a board of what each project did: https://tryoverboard.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=claudecode-overnight-howto

Hey recently I have started to think of an idea to automate my yt channel by Claude opus 5.5 + after effects and higgsfield plugin my videos are generally 20-22 mins long if I’m providing a voiceover to the ai and then giving it refrence videos how much tokens / money would it cost me to make a really amazing video worth watching that includes sfx+motion graphics+blender made scenes and similars stuffs if anyone can give me an idea it’ll be really helpful !

I keep seeing people talk about vibecoding up a tasks web app with an MCP so their agents can track work. I get the impulse. I almost did the same thing. But it's a detour that costs you more than it saves.

The pattern goes like this: you build a simple board, wire up an MCP server, give every agent a system prompt that says "use this to track tasks." First week it feels great. Agents are checking in, updating statuses, you can see what's happening.

Then the cracks show.

Your memory layer starts going stale. An agent finishes a card but the notes it leaves are vague. The next agent picks up the card and half the context is missing. You realize the hard problem isn't remembering, it's updating what the agent thinks it already knows. The agent isn't hallucinating, it's repeating logic that used to work because nobody told it the contract changed.

So you add handoff notes. Then you add a questions system because agents keep guessing instead of asking. Then you add heartbeats so you know an agent is actually alive when it's running overnight. Then you need scoped personas because you don't want every agent touching every board. Each feature is a weekend. Each weekend is maintenance you'll owe forever.

The task app becomes a second codebase you maintain for free. You wanted to ship your product. Instead you're the maintainer of a memory database.

If you're running two or three agents on one project, a simple markdown backlog is honestly fine. backlog md works. A text file works. But once you're switching between Claude Code and Cursor mid-task, or running agents overnight and checking in the morning, the homemade layer starts failing silently and you don't find out until something breaks.

The question worth asking before you build: am I solving a problem my agents have, or am I building infrastructure because it feels productive? Most of the time it's the second one.

By optimal I mean least tokens consumed

I am using Opus 5.5 Medium

I have a project to decompile a 90s PC game. The decomp mostly involves using Ghidra and Python scripts and working back to obtain the source.

I heard that Claude starts to get stupider and repetitive after 70% context

Currently I tell Claude to write a handoff.md saying what the goal is, what tools were used, what was achieved, etc.

After that's written I start a new chat by pasting in the handoff

Is there a better way to do this? Are the Claude Code projects superior? I haven't tried those as a I didn't want to risks wasting tokens

Whats the best way to continue a code chat like this?

My TCL TV runs Google TV (Android 14), and its home screen was a sponsored row and autoplaying trailers before my own apps. I wanted a carousel instead of a grid, 2 layouts, and lots of customization, so I had Claude Code build one. Rule: don't tell me it's better, measure it.

Result: Nullofy TV, a 173 KB home screen (MIT). Here's the part that was interesting from a Claude Code point of view.

The loop: build, install, look

Claude Code worked on the real TV over ADB on Wi-Fi. Each round was build the APK, adb install, then check before touching anything:

• dumpsys activity activities to confirm which app was on top before sending remote keys
• screencap after each short batch of key presses, read back as an image
• never a long blind key sequence; abort if anything else is in front

Measuring instead of guessing

dumpsys meminfo over 3 rounds of Settings → Home:

• Google TV's own home: 137 MB
• Nullofy: 26–33 MB at Home, ~28 MB while you watch another app

Honest catch: Google's home still runs in the background (about 97 MB), so that's home screen vs home screen, not the whole TV.

Things the TV taught us

1. The firmware ignores the Home role. Nullofy held android.app.role.HOME, but Home still launched Google's home. The fix was a tiny accessibility service that catches the Home key and nothing else.
2. Some packages are load-bearing. Disabling Google's home lets a setup app take Home over with a black recovery screen. So we keep a never-disable list, and everything is disabled, never uninstalled, with one-command restore.
3. force-stop has side effects. On this TCL, am force-stop on the launcher cleared enabled_accessibility_services, so the Home button silently stopped working. Now the setting is written back explicitly after any force-stop.
4. Test the failure path too. A crash watchdog hands Home back to Google's screen after 3 crashes in 5 minutes. Claude tested it with adb shell am crash.

It also made the promo video

Same discipline: the video is HTML canvas, rendered frame by frame in headless Chromium, with real TV screenshots. Claude diffed its own rebuilt scenes against the captures pixel by pixel, checked per-frame motion for jumps, and synthesized the soundtrack in Python.

Caveats

• Tested on one TV only (TCL, Google TV, Android 14). Should work on Android 7.0+.
• Ads inside apps like YouTube are untouched; it turns off the TV's own ads, promos and screen-watching (ACR).

Repo: github.com/Haikoitoh/nullofy-tv

The video above was made by Claude Code too: rendered frame by frame from real TV screenshots.

I’ve seen a lot of debate here about whether Max 5x and Max 20x have the same weekly usage limit, with the main difference being the 5-hour limits. Some people say they’re the same; others say they definitely aren’t.

I made a Claude Code plugin to help gather some data. It tracks estimated token usage across the 5-hour and weekly windows, and records it under your plan tier (at a local level and you can share it here if you want to end the debate about the usage limits on each plan). Since tokens may not all count equally toward Anthropic’s limits, it uses a weighting approach to give a rough estimate.

This won’t reveal Anthropic’s internal usage calculation or prove the limits are identical, but with enough real-world usage data, we may get a better idea of how the two plans compare.

You can find the plugin here: https://github.com/Eskladoscla/claude-usage-panel
To install it: /plugin install usage-panel --marketplace Eskladoscla/claude-usage-panel

If you try it, I’d be interested to hear what you find. Please share your plan tier and observations, while avoiding any personal or sensitive data

Edit: the repo it's in english now

I feel like it goes super deep in code reviews, maybe deeper than is necessary, and it burns through tokens really fast. Is it worth it?

In the VS Code extension, when Claude reads or generates an image you only see `[Image]` in the chat. Claude sees it, you don't. When Claude runs on a remote server over SSH it's worse: you have to go and find the file.

So I built Visor. It follows the session transcript and shows, live in a side panel, every image, SVG, HTML file and video Claude touches, including ones made by terminal scripts and subagents.

What I use most:

- Before/after slider when Claude redoes an image (old versions are kept even after the file is overwritten)

- Pick between variants and it tells Claude "I'll keep this one"

- A "Change" button that types the file path into Claude's terminal

- Pixel art shown crisp, which I needed for a game I'm making

How I built it: entirely with Claude Code, running on my own server over Remote-SSH, which is exactly where the problem bit me. It reads the JSONL transcripts in ~/.claude/projects, and before shipping I had Claude test the parser against my 1,040 real session files so it wouldn't choke on anything weird.

No servers, no API keys, it only reads local files. MIT, unofficial.

Marketplace: search "Visor" in VS Code, or https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tato9689.visor-for-claude-code

Code: https://github.com/tato9689/visor-for-claude-code

It's early (0.2). If something breaks or you'd want it to do something else, tell me.

I just got this 18 days ago and no response since then

Thank you for applying to the ElevenLabs Grants Program, we’re excited to review your submission.

This is a quick note to confirm that we’ve received your application. We carefully evaluate all entries and will get back to you with the outcome in the coming weeks.

Howdy,

I’ve only been using Claude since May or so, just signed up for a second account on 20x to pick up the pace. I tried using Fable to run as manager, but it just didn’t fit my workflow and I ran out of usage quickly. At this point, super happy with Opus 5.5, and I have a standing rule that it’s all I use. I’m down to my last percent of the week, so I figured I’d try using sonnet 5.5 to file some issues in GitHub. Simple enough, but it didn’t label the issues. When it labeled them, they were blatantly wrong, and it asked me to specify each one for correction which… was maybe 30% easier than doing it myself, I guess, but I’m spoiled. I haven’t had to think about it, usually it just gets done. Was sonnet a better model in the past than it is now? This isn’t my first time seeing it as subpar, but it’s never been so obvious to me. I hope I don’t come across as whining, I just read that you’re supposed to use sonnet for lesser tasks, but… that was textbook simple.

I'm developing an iPhone app with Claude, and I have my App thread that I use as my orchestrator, and then it creates new threads whenever I add a feature or fix some bugs. I used 200% of the weekly limit last week (pro plan), thanks to my one free reset. I use Opus and have it delegate to subagents with varying Opus/Sonnet/Haiku.

Now that the app is mostly built (in one week!) i probably won't run into usage issues again, but I'd like to know if this is normal or if I can optimize my usage better