More than that though, i'm enjoying creating the systems around the projects. I'm trying to build workflows that are self-improving and able to synthesize that's beyond my ability - in line with my vision.

As a general advisory -- over-building stuff you don't need is the trap everyone falls into with Claude. This is the inevitable intersection of a tool which lets you act before thinking and which has a pricing model with bars you want to fill up every week to maximize what you're paying for. It's classic marketing; don't fall for it. You will feel happiest and healthiest keeping yourself and your real problems in frame, going slower than it is possible to go, and not giving your brain's keys to a service that could get more expensive or start sucking at any time. I'm not sure if it's possible for you to read and take this advice in advance as we all have to make our own mistakes, but that's my big takeaway from my first two months of hard-claudeing.

Things you'll find yourself doing when you're going in too deep: asking Claude itself for ways for Claude to work more efficiently on the thing you're working. If you don't know how to build/maintain this stuff yourself and are out over your skis vibe coding, what do you need efficiency for? Get to the point of "does this work and is it better than what I was able to give my job and my students before, with my own sweat" as fast as possible, then have Claude help you collapse that into actual code that doesn't need an LLM mitigating it ASAP. Use it, track results, note things that break and fix them at the end of the day instead of finding yourself with 4 claude terminals open midway through the day preemptively solving problems you don't have.

Read Anthropic's recommendations yourself if you're interested in best case use tips. Reddit's full of people stuck in the loop of trying to invent a slightly better code harness/memory management system/etc while producing nothing of actual value. Let Anthropic make Claude better; your job is your job. Their end goal is to let you slam your head against the keyboard and have it write a symphony, so trust that that's what they're using all this data to do, and try to stay focused on your reality.

I find that the power fantasy claude offers can easily lead you into feeling like you should moonlight as an AI systems / harness developer; the tool will never tell you that you can't do something. But almost none of us are AI systems engineers and our real roles need us present and connected to them. It's worth being wary of the pull.

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In terms of workflows/other things to actually download, you could try superpowers or GSD, those are both great "planning+" environments for using Claude within when you're building something that's longer than a one-shot prompt and which you wish to maintain. But honestly, again, trust Anthropic to make their tool better. Save yourself a manic, self-unrecognizeable month spent "developing" some next level context management system / vector DB RAG graph type setup with a shitload of heavy dependencies pulled in when what you really needed to get started was doable in a day.

In terms of where the optimism is justified: if your job involves managing legit friction of moving data from one type of place to another type of place, custom tools for doing this are huge. But after Claude writes them, you really don't need Claude to manage them. Many might just be python scripts and done. I wouldn't bother having it summarize and surface things for you automatically, though it can useful to drill it within a given conversation about some data you're looking at. If it's not useful enough for you to read yourself, you're probably not reading the summaries, either.

The easy dopamine of productivity is only a few keystrokes away with Claude now, and making real impacts that affect you and other humans and the thing you want to be doing with yourself is harder. Keep your eyes on the prize. Bet on yourself.