I typed up some thoughts for a friend about my current thinking on how to use agentic coding tools effectively. Sharing here for feedback or inspiration. Use most of your human time and tokens on making a great implementation plan I have a skill /requirements-interview that I think works really well. Credit to some commenter on www.oneusefulthing.org for this one Lately I prefer to not use the agents plan mode, but save a plan markdown document in the repository’s /docs or /plans directory This allows me to more easily use an expensive highly capable model for planning and cheaper models for the execution It also builds the skill of splitting work into smaller slices and not filling up the context window Have multiple auto review loops configured on every agent workflow This can happen at multiple levels within a local tool like Claude Code within a cloud run ( https://claude.ai/code , https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud , https://github.com/[REPO_NAME]/agent , etc) within a PR I think the PR should be the primary place where most reviewing happens Easiest to configure different models here Github PRs already built for this exact purpose! Many tools offer free or low cost reviews with different models/perspectives GitHub Copilot Codex Gemini Code Assist Claude lots of others CodeRabbit, Blocks, MatterAI, etc Typically I have GitHub Co-Pilot and Gemini Code Assist run for every single PR because they are cheap Then I optionally tag Claude and Codex with the /tag-reviewers command Can do this manually, or via a complexity gate in the command that ships a feature It’s also worth adding some review functionality within the original agent loop. I do that with the expert review skill and a stop hook that invokes the expert review skill. Use a Kanban-like UI to keep multiple different workflows organized visually Working with lots of different terminal windows or agents that were spawned via web app or a GitHub action can be difficult to track and orchestrate Tools like Vibe Kanban and Conductor give you a nice UI to organize all or most of your agentic workflows Curate a list of plugins, skills, hooks, sub-agents that help you automate mundane parts of the workflow There are literally thousands of options out there like anthropics/skills , agent-skills , and superpowers . It’s a bit overwhelming to try all the different ways to organize a workflow, so I recommend just thinking about the thing that is the most tedious or mundane that you would like to replace with a skill, hook, or sub-agent. Then either find an existing skill or customize it for your own use case. You can add these skills, hooks, and sub-agents to your global user folders if you want it to be available across multiple different repositories. If you want particular skills, hooks, and agents to be available within a repository, you need to add them within the repository. Within the repository is also required for any cloud-initiated agent instances. So if you primarily want to run things via a cloud instance, you will have to keep a copy of your favorite global skills in each repository as well. My own personal list of skills I have customized myself is here . Sometimes I might have 7 or 8 different agentic instances doing work. So I want to speed up the mundane bits of that orchestration for things like making a plan, opening PRs, initiating reviews, and then responding to reviews and fixing CI failures. My workflow right now is to create a very detailed markdown plan document using /requirements-interview use /ship with a path to the plan markdown file and any clarifying text. For example, “Implement Phase 2”. You can also point /ship at a GitHub or a Linear issue/task. Invoke /pr-review or /finish as needed Test out moving some tasks to recurring workflows Possible use cases Look at recent code changes and: Update docs Improve tests Simplify code Abstract shared utils Review content site for errors, corrections, updates, improved links Review open PRs and prioritize comments and fixes fix CI failures Review repo issues Leading options that I know of today GitHub Agentic Workflows , Claude routines , Codex Automations A benefit to recurring workflows is that you can schedule them to run at night when tokens might be cheaper or not conflicting with your working hours For PRs that were initiated via these recurring workflows, I end up using the /finish skill a lot Type with voice It’s faster! Lot’s of options , but I have yet to find something better than Wispr in my own testing submitted by /u/jjrides
Originally posted by u/jjrides on r/ClaudeCode