November 1, 2025
Docs vs vibes: code cage match
How I Use Every Claude Code Feature
Power user spills Claude secrets; commenters clash over vibes, docs, and customers
TLDR: A dev shared a meticulous guide for using Claude Code, centering on a powerful project rules file. Comments exploded into a showdown: keep it simple with one-line docs, mock guide culture as outdated, or refocus on real customers—plus one joker who just yells at the bot until it obeys.
A power user just dropped their full playbook for Claude Code, calling the CLAUDE.md file the project’s constitution and bragging about a “shoot-and-forget” workflow that judges the final pull request, not the messy journey. Translation for non-tech folks: it’s a guide that tells the robot coder how your project works, with strict guardrails at work and chill vibes at home. Cue the comment fireworks.
One camp cheered practical hacks: simonw swears the shortest path is a one-line CLAUDE.md that points to AGENTS.md—yes, literally “@AGENTS.md”—citing Anthropic docs. Then he dropped an MCP link (Model Context Protocol = the “plug adapter” that connects tools to AI) praising fewer, stronger tools over bloated complexity. The skeptics rolled in hot: sublinear said these guides “read like a Prolog manual from the 1980s,” arguing today’s tips will age like milk. Meanwhile johnrob asked if the industry is forgetting actual customers while obsessing over tool rituals. Comic relief arrived via abacadaba, who admits they type in “horribly misspelled English” and just “yell at it until it does it right.” The drama: do we keep polishing rulebooks, chase “vibes” that feel good, or get back to building things people want? The thread felt like a reality show: Docs vs Vibes vs Customers—choose your fighter.
Key Points
- •The author uses Claude Code frequently for hobby and professional projects, sometimes running it in a VM with --dangerously-skip-permissions.
- •They help build AI-IDE rules and tooling; their team consumes several billion tokens per month for code generation.
- •The CLI agent space includes Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and Codex CLI, with a perceived race between Anthropic and OpenAI.
- •CLAUDE.md is treated as the agent’s constitution: strictly maintained in a professional monorepo (13KB, possibly growing to 25KB), documenting tools used by ≥30% of engineers and enforcing token budgets.
- •Best practices include guardrail-focused documentation, avoiding @-file embedding, providing alternatives to negative-only constraints, simplifying complex commands via bash wrappers, and syncing CLAUDE.md with AGENTS.md.