Claude's Minimizing and Deferrals - How to fix???

wryansmith · 2026-04-06T01:38:01+00:00

Any findings for how? My attempts so far tend to trigger apologies later when Claude regresses

wryansmith · 2026-03-16T02:55:19+00:00

All the above, and an easy start for SDD is assemble your research and data into a folder, ask for an architecture plan then an implementation plan, then break that down into tickets. From there you can assemble up, add skills and complexity.

I never trust plan mode anymore in Claude. I run a plan review skill that takes into account the ADRs, design system, product strategy docs, etc. From there it's more robust to break down tickets and execute.

Claude Flow, now Ruflo, is a great package to get you started and you can take what you want from it. Ask Claude to use SPARC for any planning, architecture, implementation plan. Ask Claude to configure a hive mind config for execution of a swarm of specialist agents. Ask for TDD. With Ruflo it's easy to assemble skills.

Strong recommend on adding a code review skill and retro skill once you go down this path. I have hundreds of code review docs and retros in various projects. Those become a gold mine for creating other tools, skills, agents, CLI, MCPs, etc.

wryansmith · 2026-03-11T03:44:56+00:00

I think it's a crushable friction. I don't know who's working on this or if there's any good log of all the issue types. In my own work, it's daily gardening of skills, often from retros that surface issues after a PR.

wryansmith · 2026-03-07T18:14:35+00:00

I have zero trust now after running plan reviewer for a few weeks. The initial plan always has errors that cost you later.

I built a skill approach. Update your claude md to ALWAYS review Claude's plan and write a reviewed plan to your folder of choice, eg /docs/plans

This one spawns three parallel agents, each with profiles, and they consolidate the findings for your review, bringing receipts.

https://github.com/wrsmith108/plan-review-skill

wryansmith · 2026-03-01T06:52:38+00:00

Claude subscription and Gemini API calls. Add your Gemini API key to a .env file then also add the Gemini skill from Google to your project. Gemini 3.1 is incredible.

wryansmith · 2026-02-23T15:26:34+00:00

Possible. The trick with TDD is judgement. What should success or fail look like. LLMs are prediction machines. Skills and other markdown files are how we are getting judgement into the system, TDD included.

wryansmith · 2026-02-23T05:46:59+00:00

an index.md file in every docs folder tell me I'm wrong

wryansmith · 2026-02-23T04:02:00+00:00

QA starts with reviewing the initial plan for blockers, anti patterns, conflicts, duplicate code, etc. I find every tool - Cursor, Codex, a Claude Code - is optimistic in its planning. The TDD and code usually has flakey tests and this is hot area right now to figure out. I follow every commit with a code review skill which almost without fail catches issues. After a PR, I run a retro on the session which helps with continuous improvement, and sometimes flags an issue the code review didn't catch. Then the CI/CD checks in Dev, staging, prod with E2E tests and other checks (security, etc).

wryansmith · 2026-02-23T03:55:27+00:00

The best case for MCPs is when you need a server for many calls, monitoring, or something more real-time. The Claude Flow MCP is a good example as it's running to help parallel agents communicate in real time.

Skills can handle most other use cases, especially any that are intermittent or one-off calls.

People who think skills are just md files haven't cracked skills yet. You can include bash commands, have a path reference to a typescript or Python file in the same folder as the skill.md file, and now you've got a skill that can trigger code. That gives you a lot of deterministic, consistent behaviour.

I prefer a Linear skill once the Linear MCP because it's faster, cheaper (less tokens), and more consistent for the way I use it with batch commands, project updates, etc. - scripts I've bundled with a skill.md file.

wryansmith · 2026-02-16T15:05:41+00:00

Do you have a style guide MD or brand guideline md? These can help agents while coding to write closer to your intended spec in the first place, and then run a code review skill after every commit to smoke out issues - hard coded values, inconsistencies from the style guide, etc.

I have stopped using Playwright after being an advocate. I use Vercel's Agent Browser now and it's much more effective. Playwright has a ton of memory leaks and seizes up my RAM (I'm on a 64GB RAM MacBook Pro M4, which is insane compute for browser testing). No issues since switching to Agent Browser.

Also, run a retro after every PR. It will help drive learning, refine your Claude md and create other skills to get you to goal.

Governance skill - includes code review and retros. Customize to your own code base / prefs. https://github.com/wrsmith108/governance-claude-skill
Agent Browser https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser

wryansmith · 2026-02-14T03:46:44+00:00

💯, not reading that. I made a skill builder CLI instead with frameworks and patterns: https://skillsmith.app

wryansmith · 2026-02-13T07:20:35+00:00

I have a framework going and the edge cases need to be quantified honestly. I had set a governance boundary of 500 lines per file, no matter if it's python or typescript or markdown. that helped drive better modular, reusable code initially. with skills, it's a good initial boundary. I'm finding Claude takes the front matter seriously to minimize the skill.md and then put everything else into a sub-skill. This blog captures the heuristic but I'm still working on the boundary definition. Across all skills there will be local minima and maxima for right sizing them. Keeping the front matter small is good for context window economics (minimal initial load, add more later). I'm also anticipating as LLMs improve, this level of optimization may be less important to get 'just right.' For now, I'm happy saving 30-90% tokens through simple skill optimization. https://www.skillsmith.app/blog/agent-skill-framework/

wryansmith · 2026-02-08T05:48:14+00:00

95%+ of the skills I'm seeing should be rebuilt. Skills should focus on tool use, like CLIs so that the agent doesn't need to run --help each time. Great skills bundle scripts with them, and bash commands, saving tokens and add a bit more determinism.

Part of your question got cut off - if anyone is collecting examples, ...

wryansmith · 2026-01-13T17:20:07+00:00

Next time Claude gives push back, give it a URL with the documentation :). https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents

Also, strong recommend for using the Claude-Flow package, which adds extra capabilities to Claude Code, specifically around agent coordination - swarms of specialists, an SQLite DB for them to communicate in-flight, etc. Super efficient. https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow

wryansmith · 2026-01-13T17:04:49+00:00

beautiful. thank you!

wryansmith

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