Claude Code Setup Secrets Unveiled 🚀

Carl Vellotti returns for his 3rd episode. His first two crossed over 1M views. Today he shows how to turn Claude Code into a full PM operating system with context management, sub-agents, self-checking skills, and Jupyter notebooks.

Full Writeup: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/carl-vellotti-3
Transcript: https://www.aakashg.com/carl-vellotti-podcast-3/

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Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro
1:40 - Does Claude Code still matter vs Cowork and OpenClaw
6:51 - Setting up the context status line
10:41 - Ads
12:03 - Sub-agents for context preservation
17:49 - Creating skills live
23:58 - The ask user questions tool
31:13 - Ads
33:33 - Tool-powered skills with Tavily and Firecrawl
36:57 - CLI vs MCP vs API hierarchy
39:30 - Make slides skill with Puppeteer
43:32 - Auto-invoking skills with hooks
46:49 - Jupyter notebooks for data trust
55:09 - The operating system file structure
1:05:58 - Outro

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Key Takeaways:

1. Context management is the real skill - A single web search eats 10% of your context. Run /context to see what is consuming it. System prompt and MCPs take 10-16% before you type one message.

2. Sub-agents save 20x context - Delegate research to a sub-agent. Same task costs 0.5% instead of 10%. Your main session only gets the summary.

3. Replace MCPs with CLIs - MCPs eat context by existing. CLIs have zero overhead. GitHub CLI, Vercel CLI, Google Workspace CLI are all dramatically more efficient.

4. Powerful skills need zero code - Anthropic's front-end design plugin is just a good prompt. No APIs or tooling. Just rules that tell Claude "do not look like AI."

5. Give Claude self-checking tools - The make slides skill uses Puppeteer to screenshot output, measure overflow, and fix issues before you see them.

6. Repeat prompts for better quality - A Google paper showed pasting a prompt twice helps. Tell Claude to double-check against skill instructions after the first pass.

7. Use hooks to auto-invoke skills - A user_prompt_submit hook matches your words against skill keywords instantly. Zero context cost.

8. Jupyter notebooks solve data trust - Every analysis shows exact code, inputs, and outputs. Traceable and reproducible.

9. Build an operating system - Knowledge folder for people context. Projects folder for task isolation. Tools folder for scripts. CLAUDE.md for identity.

10. The people folder compounds - Connect meeting transcription. After every meeting, update each person's dossier. Every prompt gets more specific over time.

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👨‍💻 Where to find Carl Vellotti:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlvellotti/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/carlvellotti
Newsletter: The Full-Stack PM

👨‍💻 Where to find Aakash:
Twitter: https://www.x.com/aakashg0
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashgupta/
Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com

#claudecode #aipm

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