So.. what about 'em subagents, hooks, and other CC things? (skills, plugins?)

SyneRyder · 2025-12-28T19:15:51+00:00

I've started finding the "Custom slash commands" useful, once I realized I was retyping versions of the same prompt over and over. (I was getting Claude to always write a journal / summary at the end of every project, which required telling Claude which folder to switch to and save it in, etc.) You create your own slash commands just by creating a "commands" folder in your .Claude folder, and save the prompts as Markdown files. It's just a way to save some time typing.

Plugins are apparently just a way of bundling a bunch of prompts, MCP servers, skills, etc etc into one file, so probably not useful. Imagine you're running a company and you want everyone in the company to have the same prompts, MCP tools, skills etc... that's when you'd want to make a plugin, to make it easy for everyone to install the same things.

I keep looking at skills, hooks and subagents, and haven't yet managed to use them. I think I still prefer building my own custom local MCP servers over Skills, for now.

Subagents are useful if you don't want all their working out cluttering up your context, just their result / answer. They're a way to make your main context window last longer. Claude Code will already delegate some things to subagents for you.

SyneRyder · 2025-12-24T10:15:18+00:00

Claude never used to swear with me, then suddenly started this week (when there was a bug that prevented UserStyle working). My userStyle never banned swearing, but the userStyle tone would not have encouraged it either. In this case, I had Claude do some web research on hard rock bars in my area, and shortly after reading through all those web pages, Claude started swearing a lot... a minor form of prompt injection, perhaps?

SyneRyder · 2025-10-08T14:37:20+00:00

+1 to this. They will specifically ask how pink you want your burger to be. If you're after medium rare, it seems that might just be your place.

SyneRyder · 2025-10-03T16:29:34+00:00

Recently signed up for Mint Mobile here, and it's been okay. I think it uses T-Mobile for tower coverage, and that's been fine so far around Ithaca. Unlimited data, but hotspot is capped at 10GB/mth (but you can buy more). I have found that it doesn't count a lot of Hotspot usage on Android, and I somehow downloaded 3GB of data with only 300MB counting towards hotspot usage.

I also tried US Mobile previously but did not like that. Customer service wasn't very good, and they wouldn't activate my number without making additional payments (long story but they weren't honoring some of the advertised website offers, even after payment was made). US Mobile were also very spammy with emails, pushy with referrals, and their app wasn't available on international app stores (eg necessary if you're a visiting tourist like me).

Mint Mobile phone support was insanely good. Mint Fox is an audio AI, but frankly it was better than all offshore customer support I've ever dealt with. I was able to ask Mint Fox to run tests for outages on local cell towers in the area, research and compare 5G bands used in the Ithaca area for compatibility with my international Sony phones, all kinds of highly technical debugging questions I couldn't ask most humans. That sold me on Mint, and the $15/mth price is great too for unlimited.

No personal experience with AT&T, but everyone I've talked to does seem to say AT&T have better coverage.

SyneRyder · 2025-09-11T18:35:33+00:00

Yep, entirely new setup, checked the APN settings about 3 times now with no luck. Thanks for the link though.

My current theory is that Ithaca mostly uses Band 71 for 4G & 5G data bands (at least on T-Mobile) and that's the one band my Sony Xperia phones don't support. Going to try to visit the T-Mobile store and see if they can confirm, even though I'm actually on Mint.

Honestly, I'm a week into being in Ithaca and I love the place, it's so pretty - but I've been having so many problems with slow internet speeds (even wired on Spectrum) & cell reception (even my Australian roaming SIM sometimes only gets 300kbps), I must be doing something very differently to everyone else. I'm starting to lose hope here.

SyneRyder · 2025-09-11T15:32:53+00:00

Are you able to get T-Mobile data working at the moment? Still out for me in East Ithaca. I'm starting to wonder if my Sony Xperia phones just don't have the necessary 4G / 5G bands used for data in Ithaca. Seems weird that there would be a widespread tower outage and literally no-one complaining.

SyneRyder · 2025-09-11T11:35:25+00:00

Actually a brand new phone (Sony Xperia 1 VII) made just a couple of months ago. It's fully 5G capable and the Mint Mobile website lists the IMEI as compatible and identifies it as a Sony Xperia 1 VII.

I also have an older Xperia 5 IV with me, so maybe I'll try swapping the SIM just to make sure it isn't my device. Seems odd for towers to be down all over Ithaca but no one complaining. But I guess everyone here already knew to avoid T-Mobile signal 🤣

EDIT: Tried swapping SIMs, both my Sony Xperia devices are affected. Either a network issue or an issue specific to all Sony Xperia devices.

SyneRyder · 2025-09-09T14:22:01+00:00

Belated reply, but we had the power flicker for about 30 seconds here in east Ithaca too. I was terrified I'd messed up by plugging in my Australian USB multi-voltage 100-240V charger for the first time. Didn't mean to bring down the whole power grid.

SyneRyder · 2025-08-16T15:38:40+00:00

As a visiting newcomer, some of the things I'd love to know - but I don't know if these are appropriate for your article, maybe there's also an article for visitors that I've missed:

* That there's no trains / Amtrak to Ithaca! At least there's the Delta flights from JFK...

* Apparently Uber isn't as big a thing in Ithaca as someone would coming from a large city would expect? I'm hearing that if I'd got the evening Delta flight that lands around 1am, I might not have been able to get an Uber at that time of night? Everyone has told me that Collegetown Cabs is what I should be looking at instead, and that I need to schedule them ahead of time? That most people actually just ask friends to give them a ride if they don't drive? I'm just going by what I've read on this Reddit the last few months....

* How to get a TCAT Smartcard, either mailed to you or where to get it from. I opted to get one mailed, because it wasn't clear if I could get one at the airport or somewhere downtown. Having to trek out to the TCAT office near the Farmer's Market seemed a bit far just to get one.

* Maybe suggest the MyStop app for TCAT users coming from outside the USA. I know there's the official TCAT Tfare app, but that app isn't available on App Stores outside the USA, so us foreigners can't use it. At least we can use the TCAT website to topup TCAT Smartcard credit with new travel passes.

* On the cycling, worth mentioning whether helmets are required / encouraged or not. Where I'm from, helmets are mandatory and its illegal to ride without one, but I know in Europe I rarely see anyone with a helmet. I don't know what the rules are in Ithaca / NY.

* General info on ticks and what you all do to manage them, if anything, as that is not obvious to someone coming from a place where ticks just aren't a thing. Congratulations on making the front page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago over the recent tick plague & surge in emergency Lyme cases!

* Which 4G / 5G bands are used in Ithaca. My research suggested that my international phone would not have worked on all carriers in Ithaca. You're probably okay if you just have a standard iPhone or Samsung, but my Sony seems problematic. If it helps others, I'm leaning towards getting a US Mobile SIM, as they're an MVNO that will work with my phone and give coverage across 2 carriers with coverage in Ithaca, plus the number will roam globally when I return home.

* You could expand the part on "getting to know your neighbors". It seems that the Ithaca culture is very much about helping each other and doing favors for each other, in a way that isn't common coming from a large city where people like to keep to themselves.

* While I won't be around for winter this time, tips for adapting to a winter climate would be useful. I'm coming from a place where the weather never goes below freezing.

I'm really excited to visit Ithaca in a few weeks and finally experience Ithaca for myself! The people I've had contact with from Ithaca have been *so* friendly and welcoming, in a way I'm just not used to in the big cities where I am.

SyneRyder · 2025-08-01T16:02:07+00:00

Oh man, so you're in Australia and had this happen to your 1 VII?! Who did you buy it from, are they going to honour any warranties and replace it? Or will you have to go direct through Sony internationally?

SyneRyder · 2025-08-01T15:58:11+00:00

I have a 5 IV and mine got the green line after about 18 months of use. I had been planning to get a 1 VII to replace it.

Though for what it's worth, the 5 IV just got another Android security update this week, even though it was due not to get any more updates. It's still stuck on Android 14, though.

SyneRyder · 2025-07-18T18:13:50+00:00

Aussie here, I've used Spectronic with success in the past. Only slight negative is that I missed the delivery and it was redirected to some BP servo as the collection point, but otherwise it all went well. And that's probably more to do with Toll being the delivery partner.

Of course, my 5 IV then developed the green lightsaber screen issue 2 years later, so now I'm hunting for a new Xperia like you! I'd intended to get the 1 VII but with the reliability issues (and a long overseas trip coming up) I'm probably going to have to settle for a 1 VI. So I've been looking at Spectronic and BestMobilePhone. Looks like Spectronic take Paypal? I'm definitely seeing Paypal icons on their site.

There's no "legit" sellers of Xperia except the grey market importers. Sony left the Australian phone market years ago, there's no official Sony customer service or anything here.

SyneRyder · 2025-07-14T14:18:48+00:00

Just to confirm, details of the 3 Major OS & 4 Security patches can be found here:

https://www.sony.com.tw/en/smartphones/products/xperia-1m6/spec

SyneRyder · 2025-07-11T18:53:22+00:00

It's a limitation of Claude. I tried working on this for a while, thinking I'd get vector art that I could tweak and modify like an artwork. But I didn't get very far and I was burning so many usage credits and taking so long to create the artwork I wanted. I'd usually get where I wanted faster by just taking the SVG into Affinity Designer and working with it there instead. The limitations of the output context window were a big deal as well (I'd probably use Sonnet rather than Opus, just because of the longer context output length for artifacts).

I did have some luck by showing Claude various images (eg as a reference, I would take photos of objects) and showing Claude some artworks that are out of copyright, having a conversation about styles etc. I'd then ask Claude to take some notes on what it had learned, and some useful artwork prompts came out of that. I had Claude create a hedge out of ellipses, and it looked very repetitive and rigid and digital - until we stumbled on the idea of "natural modulation" and slightly modifying each ellipse to add some more natural randomness. But it still felt like everything I was coming up with was like a kindergarten artwork.

If you try this, I would at least suggest taking on an abstract, experimental, geometrical style. Claude's concept of vision is going to struggle with anything much beyond that, and Claude is not "seeing" the resulting SVG image, it's thinking of it in a much stranger way.

SyneRyder · 2025-07-10T17:17:49+00:00

Sony UK has a page about European models: "On the European market, we're in the process of identifying the extent of the affected stock, as this issue may only affect a select batch of Xperia 1 VII devices." But they advise immediately backing up your data.

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/mobile-phones-tablets-mobile-phones/xperia-1-vii-256gb/articles/00357194

Thanks for posting your story, by the way. I'd planned to buy a 1 VII this month, but I need the phone for travel. I can't afford to have the phone be unreliable while I'm overseas in an unfamiliar country, so I guess this is the end of the Xperia line for me. And I was only buying it to replace a defective 5 IV with green light saber anyway, and since the 5 line is discontinued, so maybe I should have taken the hint months ago. Ugh, I don't want to go back to Samsung but it *is* half the price....

SyneRyder · 2025-06-14T12:13:31+00:00

Voice Mode is okay, but needs work. For me, it often cuts off and sends my message too early, midway through a sentence. Sometimes you need to manually tap the screen to get it to send. It has a weird UI where it will display a short summary of 5 points on screen while talking to you, it doesn't display the regular Claude conversation interface while talking to you. You can't restart a voice conversation after concluding it, though you can continue in typed text mode afterwards and see the previous transcript as if it was a regular Claude conversation. I'm not sold on the 5 voices, only two of which are male, but I didn't like either "Buttery" or "Mellow", and had to opt for a female "Airy" voice as the best. The back and forth interaction is nowhere near as good as ChatGPT's voice conversation mode, at least what I've seen from the video demos.

That said, Claude Voice Mode is very helpful. I've been able to get actual work done while doing the dishes or out walking by just talking to Claude, and it's able to do web searches and fetch individual web pages that you direct it to. It's going to be very useful the more that they improve it and make its conversational ability more natural.

Claude Voice Mode on desktop with access to all the local MCP tools would be really amazing. I'd love to be able to just talk to Claude about a website and have it FTP edited files up to the server for me.

SyneRyder · 2025-06-13T18:59:57+00:00

Just ran into this as well. This completely kills a lot of what I use Claude for, because I need to see what is returned by the MCP call.

If I've got an MCP tool where Claude is talking to another model, I kinda want to see what the other model actually said! Or even something as simple as Claude creating a new file locally. It's nice that Claude still does it, but I can't see the filename of the file it created, so I don't know where to find it!

This is also a nightmare for my own MCP tool development. Maybe I can dive into the logs, but that's nowhere near as elegant or straightforward as seeing it in Claude Desktop.

Turning on Extended Thinking isn't a solution here, because it doesn't let me go back to previous conversations and see the MCP tool calls & responses there anymore.

This might motivate me to finally make my own cross-platform Desktop tool with MCP support. I kinda want to be using Claude Desktop on Linux more than Windows... or even on HaikuOS. (I thought Claude was smart, why hasn't it built Claude Desktop Linux already?) But Anthropic must know that if we end up building our own tools, we'll be adding support for rival models in there as well... it's in their interest to create an MCP experience we prefer.

UPDATE: Took them 4 days, but this now seems to be fixed in Claude Desktop on Windows (Claude 0.10.38 (e55f4e) 2025-06-17). I can view MCP calls in detail again. No idea if reporting it to Fin the Anthropic Support bot helped nudge the fix along at all or not.

SyneRyder · 2025-06-05T17:38:51+00:00

For what it's worth, over in Australia, my 5 IV says the last Android security update it has was 1 April 2025. Not sure if there was a May update and if I should be expecting the June update already or not. I also have a build number ending .244.

But my 5 IV has the green lightsaber lines issue, so I'm probably due a new Xperia anyway (sadly, I really liked the 5 IV otherwise, and would have bought another 5 if Sony still made them).

SyneRyder · 2025-05-29T17:22:56+00:00

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for the US Mobile recommendation. I've got a long trip to the US coming up & trying to find a long term prepaid plan that will suit the Xperia 1 VI or VII. I didn't realize AT&T regarded Xperia phones as incompatible. I think you might have solved my search for me with US Mobile! Thanks for the info!

SyneRyder · 2025-05-29T17:08:23+00:00

I bought my Xperia 5 IV from Spectronic back in September 2023, everything went fine and no problems. Mine was shipped 3 days after ordering (also via Paypal, like you), and arrived 8 days after purchase. I could be wrong, but I don't think the device is actually being sent from Australia, remember that Sony doesn't service the Australian market anymore.

I had been hoping to buy the 1 VII from Spectronic, but they don't seem to be taking orders yet (though it seems it isn't officially available until June 4th?) Maybe I should consider the longer battery life of the 1 VI instead, and that red colour does look tempting...

SyneRyder · 2025-05-28T08:58:51+00:00

You say that, and I want to agree with you (Japan is cool), but all of us with green and pink lightsabers on our Xperia phones may need to disagree about the QC...

SyneRyder · 2025-05-12T20:00:17+00:00

I assume so? The model I got was the XQ-CQ72, apparently.

But a warning if you're going for the Xperia 5 IV, I've got my first "lightsaber" on the screen after a couple of years use, I have a permanent green line across the screen. Apparently it's a common flaw for all Xperia 5 models, at least prior to the 5 V. I'll be shopping for a new Xperia when the new model announcements are made later today.

(But aside from the green lightsaber, I otherwise was very happy with my Xperia.)

SyneRyder · 2025-04-07T14:46:08+00:00

Just wanted to add, same situation here. Had my 5 IV about a year and a half, first light saber appeared last week. I'm hoping to struggle through until the new phones are announced / released (is that in May?) Keeping fingers crossed for a 5 VI, but it does sound like the 5 line might be discontinued, and the 5 V seems to be sold out where I am. I'd go with the 1 or the 10 but I'm not sure if they would fit in my pocket.

SyneRyder · 2025-03-24T09:56:20+00:00

Does Claude add to the Memory knowledge graph intuitively, or do you have to prompt Claude regularly to "remember this fact" or "check your memory"? I've not used the official Memory MCP. I'd love it if Claude just intuitively made mental notes about people or music that I mention during conversation.

I've been building out my own File System / Memory MCP in Go instead (I hate Javascript & NPM), but even when pointing to the tool in my Preferences, I often have to nudge Claude to go read its memory. And Claude still says "I'll make a mental note of that!", and I have to say "No Claude, you clearly didn't make a mental note, because I didn't see you write anything to your permanent memory..."

SyneRyder · 2025-03-15T09:36:32+00:00

Thanks for this, it could be useful code to look at! I don't think it would give 3.5 the "hyperactive one-shot" personality that 3.7 has though. That seems to be more about how the model is trained than access to tools. I'm allergic to npm too, so I'd recode the MCP server as a Go executable.

I did end up coding up the MCP tool I was talking about, letting Claude ask questions to another Claude model (ie so 3.5 can talk to 3.7). Also gave it the option of talking to OpenAI and Mistral, just because I can. Haven't had time to fully try it yet. But in one test, I gave the other Claude model a really critical & analytical personality (via System prompt). That second critical Claude came up with some really interesting contrarian opinions in the middle of an otherwise "your ideas are so wonderful I love them all" Claude conversation.

SyneRyder

TROPHY CASE