Best Practices for Claude Code

Claude Code is an agentic coding environment. Unlike a chatbot that answers questions and waits, Claude Code can read your files, run commands, make changes, and autonomously work through problems while you watch, redirect, or step away entirely.

This changes how you work. Instead of writing code yourself and asking Claude to review it, you describe what you want and Claude figures out how to build it. Claude explores, plans, and implements. But this autonomy comes with a learning curve -- Claude works within certain constraints you need to understand.

This skill covers patterns that have proven effective across Anthropic's internal teams and for engineers using Claude Code across various codebases, languages, and environments. The single most important thing to understand: Claude's context window fills up fast, and performance degrades as it fills. Everything else follows from this constraint.

When to Use This Skill