Some AI development resources this week…

How to Build an AI Code Agent

Thorsten Ball has published how to build your own AI code agent. He creates a toy example in Rust that’s <400 lines but still includes tool use. Geoffrey Huntley does the same. It’s worth reading both

Claude Code Best Practices

Anthropic has released a detailed guide on Claude Code best practices.

Of note:

  1. Claude can (and should!) use the architect/plan then code model that Aider makes explicit. Telling Claude to read code/docs, then plan, then code, then commit gives better results than just telling it to write code
  2. Ask Claude to review things (e.g. the CLAUDE.md hint files) and suggest improvements. Repeat. (As an aside, the Anthropic workbench can improve general prompts)
  3. Telling Claude to ’think’, ’think harder’ etc results in more thinking tokens being used
  4. Clear context frequently (/clear) - usable context window is smaller than the advertised max

The model of asking Claude to review and improve its work (or human starting points) repeatedly was not obvious to me