Guides for Claude Code builders
Opinionated, short, citing the people doing the actual work. No encyclopedias. Read what you need, skip the rest.
- Mental Model
Skills vs MCP vs Prompts: the five-tool carpentry framework
Five tools, five jobs. A practical framework for picking the right one — Skill, prompt, project, subagent, or MCP — without overthinking it.
7 min readRead - Cheatsheet
The 6 Claude Skill design principles
A SKILL.md is not a README. Six opinionated rules — with Good vs Bad examples — that separate Skills that fire from Skills that just sit there.
9 min readRead - Playbook
Cleanup your Claude Code in 45 minutes
The 8-phase audit that recovers 5 hours a month and stops bleeding $75–$375 a month at API tier on plugins you forgot you installed.
12 min readRead - Strategy
MCP isn't enough — and the critics are half right
Garry Tan, Pieter Levels, Perplexity. They got the context window wrong but the structural problem right. The four layers above transport that nobody standardized.
10 min readRead
Want a stack built for you?
Describe what you are building. Claude picks the MCPs, the Skills, and draws the architecture diagram.
Plan my stack