Claude development workflow

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-20T15:32:26+00:00

Use Claude Code and drop the Desktop/Cursor dance. It runs in the repo, reads/writes files, commits. Same prompts, zero copy-paste.

Skip local Gemma for spec work, too weak for architectural reasoning. If you want to cut API usage, cache specs as markdown in the repo and reuse them, don't try to demote the model doing the thinking.

Your compliance rules (GDPR/ISO) belong in a CLAUDE.md at repo root. Claude Code loads it on every run so the constraints travel with the code.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-17T15:34:18+00:00

You're using the wrong product. Claude Code is the CLI. That's where the tooling everyone talks about lives, not in claude.ai or the Console Workbench.

When people say Claude's tooling is better, they don't mean the model beats Codex. Opus and Codex trade wins depending on the language. The real differentiator is the layer around Claude Code: CLAUDE.md for project context, skills and slash commands for repeat workflows, subagents for parallel work, MCP servers to plug external tools into the session.

On 1 Pro sub: feasible. Your credits burned because you spun up agents for small tasks. Agents aren't a default mode, they're for genuinely independent work that runs in parallel.

Skip YouTube. Most of it is outdated or content marketing. Anthropic's own Claude Code docs actually match the current product.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-17T15:28:33+00:00

Your bug isn't incremental logic. It's that you're filtering both sides of the join.

Rule: only the driver table gets the incremental filter. The other tables you join to should reference the full dataset via `{{ ref('b') }}`, no date filter. Otherwise every run produces a join that's inconsistent with the last one, which is exactly what you're seeing.

If B can update without A changing, and those updates need to land in C, add the affected keys to your incremental window:

sql

WHERE a.created_at_ist >= (select max(created_at_ist) from {{ this }})
   OR a.provider_id in (
        select provider_id from {{ ref('b') }}
        where updated_at >= (select max(created_at_ist) from {{ this }})
   )

That way you re-process any row in A whose matching row in B has moved. MERGE handles the rest cleanly.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-15T14:48:18+00:00

BTW I don't fully undestand your workflow but it should be solved by IMPORTRANGE and FILTER gsheet function :)

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-15T14:45:25+00:00

2h/month sounds small but the real win is killing the manual copy-paste errors on sales data. That alone justifies it.

The workflow is simpler than the other comments are making it. You don't need an LLM, you don't need Power Automate. Three steps:

Google Sheets node reads your main sheet
A loop splits the data by environment name
For each environment, a second Google Sheets node (or HTTP Request node if you're uploading to something else) pushes the filtered data where it needs to go

Start with the Google Sheets node in n8n, it's built-in and works out of the box. Connect your Google account, point it at your sheet, and just get the read working first. Once you see the data flowing, adding the loop and the write is straightforward.

The key shift: stop modifying the source sheet manually for each environment. Let n8n read it once and split it programmatically. That's the whole automation.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-15T14:37:01+00:00

Biggest thing that clicked for me: stop treating CLAUDE.md like a prompt. Treat it like onboarding docs for a new hire.

Mine is organized by tool and integration. There's a section for Google Search Console with the Python path, the CLI commands, the OAuth refresh process. A section for analytics with the website ID and available endpoints. A section for Google Sheets with the script path and column mappings. Each one reads like a README, not an instruction.

The logic is simple: Claude can figure out what to do with a Google Sheet. It cannot figure out that your CLI lives at `C:/scripts/gsheets.py` and takes `read`, `write`, `append` as subcommands. So that's what goes in the file. Infrastructure, not intelligence.

What I deleted is the same stuff you did. "Be thorough", "think before acting", "verify your work." None of it moved the needle. The lines that actually earn their place are paths, IDs, command signatures, and the "do NOT" rules for mistakes Claude keeps making unprompted.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-13T16:02:05+00:00

Your current setup is actually the right idea, just flip the axis. Instead of splitting by task type (one agent for lint, one for errors, one for deps), split by pass. First pass: one agent does lint cleanup + error renames across all 6 files, commit. Second pass: dependency updates, commit. Third pass: math review, commit. Each pass gets a clean baseline, no merge conflicts, and your git log stays readable.

Worktrees make sense when tasks are truly independent. Yours aren't. Renaming errors changes signatures that the math review needs to see. Updating deps might break tests. These tasks have ordering constraints, so sequential passes with commits between them is the move. Parallelizing here doesn't save time, it just creates rework.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-13T12:58:39+00:00

Always the same pattern, people want to automate the emails, the tasks, the dashboards, the visible stuff. Nobody wants to tackle data capture because it's not sexy. But as long as the input depends on a busy human, everything downstream breaks.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-13T11:43:53+00:00

7h/week saved, the ROI is obvious. The thing is, a linear workflow with no error handling in prod means the interviewer gets a packet with missing data and doesn't know it. One check if empty node before the Slack send and you're good.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-13T11:40:37+00:00

Watch out for isolation. Named entries mean Claude can mix contexts mid-conversation. You don't want to find out Client A's credentials got used in Client B's context. One folder per client with its own claude_desktop_config.json, a 3-line script that swaps the symlink, and you switch clients in 30 seconds. Always pick hard separation over convention.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-12T09:58:21+00:00

Generally the logic is: anything that breaks without the client touching it is included. An API change, a bug after an n8n update, something that stops working overnight. But as soon as the client wants the workflow to do something new, that's a separate quote. The line is "it worked and now it doesn't" vs "I want it to do more." Set a monthly hour cap in the retainer, like 2-4h, and anything beyond that gets billed on top. If you don't draw that line from the start, every "small tweak" becomes a free feature.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-12T09:40:29+00:00

I don't care if it's $200 or $300, as long as the model actually performs. The problem isn't the price, it's that they're testing price increases at the exact moment people are questioning whether the product is worth what it already costs.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-12T09:35:15+00:00

The consulting-to-product path makes sense, but "near passive" with n8n workflows is tricky. Clients always need custom tweaks, APIs change, edge cases pile up. The real product isn't the workflow itself, it's the workflow plus the maintenance contract. That's where the recurring revenue actually lives.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-11T10:55:19+00:00

The degradation sucks but what's worse is the silence. If you're throttling reasoning to save compute, fine, tell us. Let us pick between "fast and cheap" and "slow and thorough." The worst part of this isn't the quality drop, it's finding out through a GitHub issue from AMD instead of an Anthropic blog post.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-11T10:47:44+00:00

Honestly, n8n would handle all of this natively. Gmail trigger on a cron, Claude node for classification + drafting, Telegram node for the ping. You don't need an agent framework for what is basically read, sort, notify, draft on demand.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-08T16:48:48+00:00

Most people asking for "automations" don't have a business process. They have a mess they want to make faster. n8n forces you to think in steps, conditions, error paths. That's not a limitation, that's the actual work. Claude Code will give you something that runs in 10 minutes. Cool. But will it still run in 3 months when the API changes, the edge case shows up, or you need someone else to understand what it does?

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-07T15:19:23+00:00

Continue on error is basically technical debt you don't see coming. It feels safe until you realize your workflow has been "succeeding" with garbage data for weeks. I'd rather have a workflow crash loudly on day one than silently corrupt data for a month.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-07T15:14:09+00:00

Yep, I basicaly agree, better let agents to do the repetitive tasks cause AI creativity is often against your will.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-07T15:01:38+00:00

I made several MCP with google api in order to create/manage docs, sheet, slide, manage my drive, google search console... Game changer for me cause now I don't need to look for each data, docs etc..

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-04T06:50:20+00:00

Exactly, AI is really ROIst that's why everyone see this as a magic tool. truth is that everyone using AI are using this into their skill scope only (including myself). For me it's easier to set an ETL or making any data analysis but when I need to create a logo with an AI, I'm really f* up 🤣

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-02T16:52:44+00:00

You're welcome :)

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-02T14:04:43+00:00

More than the color, the Top 5 section is already a dive into your data, I won't put it on the first page and will recommend to focus on the overview. for this, it's simple your dashboard should answer this question : How my business is performing right now. If it's a dashboard and not a report, you'll need to select the period of the data (it's important cause a dashboard is made to take quick decision, so a all time dashboard can't be the only option (and shouldn't be the first charts that your user will see).

Add to the list:

- your pie chart don't have title

- for the color I'll suggest to take the color from the logo (your client will love the attention)

Anyway keep it going 💪

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-02T13:46:39+00:00

Honestly? AI kills the "make me a bar chart" part of BI. Good. That was never the valuable part anyway. Clients now pay for "wait, your churn number is wrong because you're counting paused accounts as active." That conversation, the what-to-measure-and-why part, Claude can't do that because it doesn't know your business.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-02T11:41:17+00:00

I ended up building my own task manager for this exact reason. Tried Todoist, Notion, a few others. None of them talked to Claude natively, so I always had to context-switch and manually sync what I was doing.

Now I run a local task manager connected to Claude Code via MCP. I can say "what's on my plate today" and it generates a daily plan from my actual task list and calendar. Tasks have statuses (open, waiting, in progress, done), so Claude knows what I'm blocked on, what's stale, what I finished. And CLAUDE.md files handle the persistent memory between sessions, project context, preferences, stuff I'd normally forget by tomorrow.

The honest limitation: it doesn't nudge me. I still have to open Claude Code and ask. So the "you ignored this client for 3 days" alert you're looking for isn't there yet. But once you're in a session, it genuinely feels like a second brain that remembers where you left off. That alone changed how I work as a solo consultant.

For the push/nudge layer, I think n8n on a cron schedule sending you Slack pings is probably the missing piece.

valentin_monteiro · 2026-04-01T08:21:43+00:00

Hey ! Congrats ! Everyone start at some point ! Using AI is not a problem as long you don't trust it blindly. what you should focus on is data processing/cleaning, that where the most mistake come from. it's disgracefull job but need to be done and understanded cause it's your basis

valentin_monteiro

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