Don’t hesitate to build your own tool or even a whole program for a single operation. For a woodworker this is a fairly common situation. When there is no tool at hand that fits the job exactly, they make one. A one-off tool improves the precision and elegance of the solution. With an agent, it takes minutes.

For inspiration, here is the “Playground” skill: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/tree/main/plugins/playground and an elegant demonstration of building a one-off tool (the author is a designer, not a developer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkKGQVHrXzE&t=2172s

Before the agent writes a plan or a spec, let it interview you. Matt Pocock calls this grilling. The AI will happily ask you 30 questions, to the point where it gets a bit uncomfortable. But that is the point, fill in all the gaps and replace the agent’s hidden decisions with your own.

For me this works better than reading through a lengthy spec the agent generated from a thin brief. A side product is a shared vocabulary for more efficient communication, and a record of the important decisions.

Details and a concrete skill here: https://www.aihero.dev/skills-grill-me

Out of the box Claude Code can do more than I need day to day, and every tool and feature costs tokens right at startup. In settings.json I limited what I rarely use and dropped about a third of the system prompt and built-in tools. The difference between models is even bigger. With optimized Opus 5.5 I start a session at 8k tokens, with unoptimized Sonnet 5 at 25k. Comparison: https://html.lukastrumm.com/claude-context-compare/

The saved context lets you stay in the “smart zone” longer, making better use of the model’s own intelligence. Any feature can be turned back on for a single session when needed. Here is each setting I limited and why: https://github.com/lttr/dotfiles/blob/master/claude/README.md