For the last two months I’ve used Claude Code every day, shipping features from the terminal with zero shame, writing code powered by tokens and learning quite a bit along the way. I had already used agents for development before, Copilot in particular, but this time I took it to a completely different level of intensity.

The task and the goal was to be more productive, to be able to reach targets in impossible timeframes. To use modern technologies at a competitive pace without losing quality along the way, and without ceasing to build solid, scalable solutions. Do more with less. High cohesion and low coupling.

On top of that, for my part, there was the challenge of keeping the attitude of the craftsman, the blacksmith, even when industrial machinery is at hand. A task that turns into a paradox: how to see beyond what merely “works” thanks to sheer mass production and keep the passion for the craft. How to transfer this intrinsic concern for the work to a stochastic model.

First month

To resolve this paradox, in the first few weeks I had to learn in detail what I was dealing with. And maybe this is the best moment to get into the subject and tell you about Claude Code. A programming agent used through the terminal, which has access to different actions inside your computer.

At its core, “Claudito” works with the concept of context. Imagine a room with defined walls and square meters, where light comes in, along with the furniture, table and chairs, people and pets: like a finite space of information that gives meaning and limits to our reality. And this is important: you have to keep in mind the limitations and how many things fit in the room. The context must contain everything needed for the solutions Claude delivers to be valid and accurate. MCPs, for example (the tools or extended functions, for instance to simulate a browser or access Google Drive), take up a significant amount of space in your context, and can leave you without enough room to give the agent the key background of the problem, inevitably making it lose track of the solution.

I started using it with these concepts in mind, the way its own creators suggest. A sequence of explore - plan - code - commit, but as the weeks went by I felt I was repeating my own flows. So I looked for the other ways people were using this tool. And I discovered the concept of the harness and how to customize it.

Second month

The harness comes by default, and although it isn’t the most optimal for every problem or technology, it works. The agentic harness is defined as the set of tools, context management and execution environment that turns a language model into an agent.

In other words, it could be translated as the harness that holds a climber on the mountain. In climbing (unless it’s free solo), you need gear. Otherwise, you have nothing to hold on to; you have no protection. The harness is the safety equipment that connects you to the mountain. It gives you the ability to act, to be there and to move forward. And what better than having your own tools and adjusting them day by day.

Without this, the solution takes a bit longer, or you find yourself telling it the same things over and over. So, from the second month on, I added dedicated skills and commands for the patterns and technologies I use, taking inspiration from a repository (ECC, winner of Anthropic’s hackathon). All of this always implemented from a TDD (Test-Driven Development) perspective from day one. Tests here are vital, both to validate your code and to serve as a path for the models to understand it as the solution keeps growing. They are path and validation. Having the right patterns in every new plan secures my solution, but it isn’t free: there is a context and token cost attached to every plan. Although, in my opinion, it’s completely worth it.

And to make this harness work without running out of space, I leaned on persistent context, or memory. Since the session space is limited, per project you can have a CLAUDE.md file and various other .md files. These work as a usage guide; base instructions that Claude reads when starting inside a folder so it knows, beforehand, what the rules of your project are. The interplay between context and these files when working with Claudito also makes the difference.

In my opinion

With these techniques, Claude has become a snowball of productivity. It’s what it promises: things that once took me weeks now take me a couple of minutes. Analyses that might take me months, Claude solves in one well-run session with the right questions. It’s hard to look competitive in this industry without Claude as a copilot. Now, Claude doesn’t get distracted and doesn’t doubt. And it’s at your command like an army of one. Army of one.

I know I can still apply techniques to reduce token spend, and even use that crazy learning skill where Claude recognizes my workflows. I dream of the day when you just talk to the computer and interact with a machine of peculiar personality; as of today, this is the closest thing to what I once imagined. And I also know how different Claude is working on existing code and its tendency to create rather than maintain. That its way of maintaining is adding and adding code. That it has strong preferences and that if you get careless you end up creating a swarm. Its swarm, one you don’t understand. So my advice is to be careful and always keep understanding the moves toward the summit.

On the other hand, and with all that said, it’s hard to keep seeing myself as the craftsman forging the rings of power, devoted to one single, specific and spectacular task. The day-to-day shifted more toward that of a strategist, drawing routes and plans, swapping weapon types and pulling the king’s tokens as if it were war. Using the terminal and writing natural language to get what I want instead of flowing through logic gates.