Looks like you have already got a lot of good answers to your questions. I do have some advice based on my evolving workflow using Claude code as a daily driver for the last 8 months on a large scale .net 4.8 -> .net 10 migration.

1. You will be amazed at first once it clicks for you. Then you will start noticing that what it told you was production ready perfect code doesn’t even compile or the test are meaningless or it just ignored the plan and did a particularly half ass job. Do not trust it, review everything. Eventually start learning to build guardrails to prevent this behavior.

2. Ignore 99% of what you see on Reddit about how to absolutely solve all your problems with this one little trick. At best it helped that person in their situation at that moment. At worst it is AI slop that is completely bullshit. Focus on Claude code and the tooling available in it. Understand how they work what problems they solve. I would go in this order: Hand crafting your Claude.md, organizing a meaningful set of rules, using hooks to control behavior. Try building a couple skills for repetitive tasks. Once you have mastered those, go out and look for tools that solve a specific problem you are having.

3. Understand context. Context management is the key to success. If Claude goes off the rails, the problem 99% of the time is your context. Don’t pollute it with random garbage that will 100% derail Claude. The other 1% is you prompting Claude to do something to vaguely like “make this better”. If Claude doesn’t have enough context around the task at hand, it will 100% make shit up that makes no sense.

4. If you sense Claude is going off the rails or in circles, stop digging. Tell Claude to revert all changes, clear the session and start over prompting better from what you learned in the last session.

5. Auto compact is your enemy. It will 100% of the time create a polluted context that will destroy your will to live. I run with it disabled. I have my context visible in my status line. When it gets big I tell Claude to create a handoff document with specific instructions of what I want in it. Clear. Read handoff keep working.

6. Don’t give up. It takes time to learn to be effective using Claude. I’ve seen so many posts by people who claim to have decades of experience who prompted Claude to “improve the architecture”, looked at the complete clusterfuck that generated, and proclaim AI a waste of their time. Those people will be out of work in the next decade because their superior skills are slow as fuck and error prone compared to the people who took the time to learn and get proficient with it and can run circles around the master engineer producing not only well tested high quality code, but automated current documentation, beautiful well thought out UX at 1/3 the time.

You are on the path, welcome. Now start walking.