Tips and tricks to get the most out of Claude Code (and why Vibe Coding is costing you money)

I keep seeing posts here where people are furiously trying to reverse-engineer "secret" enterprise workflows, releasing custom implementations as if they’ve discovered fire. Honestly? You’re overthinking it. It’s not about the prompts you write; it’s about the architecture you use. I’ve spent the last few months obsessed with optimizing Claude Code (CC) and other AI tools, eventually building my own orchestration framework to automate the boring parts. Here is a list of tools and patterns that actually work for me. ### 1. First Plan, Then Execute You may call it Spec-Driven Development (SDD), you may call it simply planning, but essentially it's the same thing. Real-life development teams have been doing this forever: a well-curated plan results in a well-engineered project. You can't go "all in" from the start. Eventually, your Agent's context window will overfill and you will get lost in the progress you've made. **Vibe-coding is just AI-coding without proper structure.** If you guide your Agent through a centralized and constitutional plan document, once it fills up and starts hallucinating, you can easily manually reconstruct the progress context using that doc. A list of SDD workflows/tools that work well with CC: * **GitHub Spec-kit:** https://github.com/github/spec-kit * **OpenSpec:** https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec * **APM (Agentic Project Management):** https://github.com/sdi2200262/agentic-project-management/ (This is the framework I built, it uses dedicated CC instance as a Setup Agent to do project discovery and planning) * **CC SDD:** https://github.com/gotalab/cc-sdd (A bit opinionated since it forces development order). ### 2. Find a way for Claude to validate its actions This is kinda obvious but for some it might sound new. Since the creator of CC emphasized it, I should mention it: Claude will always make mistakes, but with proper guidance it can correct itself. Latest frontier models like Opus 4.5 have strong agentic capabilities that don't require the user to babysit them. This allows us to create loops where the user provides a request + a way to validate success, and leaves it to the model to iterate. In the development of CC, Boris explained that their way of self-validation included giving Claude access to the CC web UI, where it validated the features it just implemented. You should always define the success state of what you request from CC - kinda like Test Driven Development for LLMs. * **Boris's setup:** https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177 * **Reddit post wiht a nice breakdown:** https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q2c0ne/claude_code_creator_boris_shares_his_setup_with/ **Note:** "Agent Skills" recently introduced by Anthropic are a great way to 'teach' your CC how to use available tools and in what way to validate itself. ### 3. Use multiple instances of CC (Multi-Agent Orchestration) This has multiple benefits. First, it is simply more economically efficient. Context usage grows linearly, but cost grows *quadratically* (or at least accumulates massively) because every time you send a new message, you re-send the entire chat history to your LLM. Breaking your conversation into chunks based on logical domains is more efficient for your wallet and for Anthropic's rate limits. * Reference on a nice limits/cost reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q375z9/i_reverseengineered_claudes_message_limits_heres/ Secondly, distributing workload is more effective. It is better to have a CC for Frontend, a CC for Backend, and a CC for DB. The secret sauce here is how these separate CC instances interact with eachother. How do these agents communicate? I use a central Memory Bank acting as a context archive. All agents log their work there. When Frontend needs the Backend API, it fetches *just the relevant log*, not the entire Backend chat history or the complete source codee. This limits context transfer and prevents "pollution." * I explain this architecture in detail in the advanced docs of my framework here (it's biased towards my tool, but the logic applies universally): https://agentic-project-management.dev/docs/context-and-memory-management ### 4. Use MCP properly Don't flood your workspace with unlimited MCP servers. Constant tool description exposure consumes useful context. I limit my global MCP usage to minimal-essential servers like **Context7** (https://context7.com/) and **Chrome DevTools** (https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp). When I have a specific need, I use local MCP configuration so only *that* CC instance sees the tool. This prevents confusion points where similar tool descriptions cause hallucinations and bad tool calls. ### 5. Do pro-active handovers when context limits are reached Even with multiple agents, complex projects will eventually fill the context window. **I don't trust chat history compression.** It usually leaves big context gaps that you realize too late. I suggest switching to a new instance **proactively** (at around 80% usage). To do this effectively, you would need to design something like a "Handover Protocol" -a slash command or hook- where the outgoing agent writes all undocumented context, decisions, and working memory to a dedicated file (or files). The new agent reads that file to reconstruct the state without burning tokens re-reading the whole chat history. * In APM, I automated this with slash commands (`/handover`), which uses the Memory Logs to reconstruct context instantly. If you are doing it manually, just make sure you instruct your agent to "store its working memory to a file" before you kill the session. Anyway, the point is: stop treating Claude like a magic black box and start treating it like a junior dev that needs a spec and a PM. Adding structure is the only way to stop burning tokens in cycles and getting somewhat expected behavior from your Agent. I built APM because I was tired of doing all this manual context management myself, but the principles apply regardless of the tool you use. Hopefully, this saves you some trial and error. Feel free to ask any questions!