I was laid off in July 2025 and have spent the past ~11 months job hunting, doing interview prep, and working on side projects. I just signed an offer as a frontend dev at a mid-sized company where Claude Code is the standard AI tooling, and I start in about a week. Here’s my situation: at my last job, we were a GitHub Copilot shop. I considered myself an early adopter there, but I left at the worst possible time in terms of how fast everything has moved since. Once I was on my own, I picked up Claude Code and have been using it heavily for home automation projects and side projects. But almost everything I’ve done has been iterative back-and-forth, not really agentic. Sometimes I ask Claude whether something was a good candidate for agentic development and the answer is usually “honestly, not really” for the kind of stuff I’m building. Now I’m heading into a professional codebase at a company that already has Claude Code integrated with pre-built Skills and MCP setups. I know working in a mature codebase with multiple contributors is a completely different ballgame from spinning up greenfield side projects. What I’m looking for: advice from people who use Claude Code at work every day. Specifically: What surprised you about using Claude Code in a professional codebase vs. personal projects? Are there workflows, techniques, or mental models that clicked for you once you started using it at scale? Anything you wish you’d read or practiced before relying on it in a team environment? How do you think about when to go agentic vs. when to keep it conversational/iterative? I’ve been out of the game for almost a year and the tooling has changed a lot. Any pointers appreciated. submitted by /u/BrooklynCatDad
Originally posted by u/BrooklynCatDad on r/ClaudeCode