Once I had six Claude Code sessions open at once, the most expensive part of my workflow was not writing code. It was patrol: cycling through tabs to see which agent was still running and which one had been sitting on a question for ten minutes. tmux has no concept of any of this. To tmux, every pane is a rectangle of terminal, equally interesting, equally mute. herdr’s pitch lands exactly on that pain: panes are still real terminals, but a sidebar shows each agent’s live state. So it got a one-month trial, with exit conditions written down before it started. The verdict lands on August 16, and this post is honest about still being inside the window.
After a month of overhauling my dotfiles with AI in the loop, the real value was not "the AI writes my configs". It was two much more boring properties: the research side keeps finding things I cannot see, and I verify every claim it makes before acting. Skip the first and you only ever fix problems you already knew about. Skip the second and a plausible-sounding wrong answer walks you into a ditch. The loop # claim fails verification
I kept slamming into my Claude subscription's usage limits, and the workload didn't feel heavy enough to explain it. The culprit was allocation, not volume: my main session ran on the most capable model available, and that model was also doing the grep runs, the batch edits, and the yes/no verification passes. Flagship reasoning, billed at flagship rates, spent on work a model a tenth the price does identically well. 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS Where the tokens actually go # Two things surprised me when I looked at my consumption honestly.
The first sign that a model generation had turned over under my feet was a billing prompt that made no sense. I ran /model to switch back to Fable 5 and the CLI opened a browser tab telling me to set up usage credits, for a model my Max plan already includes. A full restart of Claude Code fixed it. That little glitch sent me digging, and what I found was a pile of changes, some breaking, some silent, scattered across at least five official pages. This is the consolidated list I wanted that week. 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.220 · macOS Eight weeks that rearranged the lineup # 06-09
Fable 5 ships
My Claude Code config now holds two hooks, ten skills, and three custom subagents, and most of them started life in the wrong layer. The instruction the model followed nine times out of ten lived in a prompt until I accepted that nine out of ten is a coin I lose every day. The workflow I pasted into chats became a skill. The bulk work that was draining my priciest model's quota became a fleet of cheaper agents. Same features, different failure modes. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 6 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS The four layers # Claude Code has four extension points, and they answer four different questions:
I run four or more Claude Code agents at once, and until recently they all shared one working tree. Two agents editing the same repo means one of them eventually builds against the other's half-finished changes. Git worktrees fix that cleanly. What nobody warned me about is that the fix multiplies a different problem I already had: forgetting which folder a session lives in. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 5 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS The symptom # With several agents in one directory, the working tree is shared mutable state. Agent A refactors a partial, agent B runs the build, and B’s “failure” is really A’s work in flight. I had been dodging this by scoping agents to different subdirectories, which works until it does not.
In Part 1 we learned that named sessions are easy to find. Now let's make naming automatic with a hook. This is also a perfect first hook project, so I'll explain the whole idea from scratch. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 2 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux Part 1 left us with one chore: you still have to remember to name your sessions. Let’s delete that chore.
You're deep in a great Claude Code conversation. You close the terminal. The next day you want to pick up where you left off… and you can't find it. Sound familiar? Let's fix that. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 1 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux What is a “session,” and where does it go? # Every time you run claude, you start a session, one conversation, with its full history. When you quit, that history doesn’t vanish. Claude Code saves it to disk, organized per project folder, here:
Once you're comfortable with AI coding agents, you start running several at once: one refactoring here, one writing tests there, one stuck waiting for your approval. Keeping them straight is its own little skill. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 4 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux Here are two ways to do it: a lightweight tmux plugin, and (briefly) dedicated “AI terminal” apps.
The hype says anyone can code now. The reality: vibe coding changes *what* senior engineers do, not *whether* we're needed. And the gap between experienced and inexperienced developers is getting wider, not narrower. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” their Word of the Year for 2025. Search interest spiked over 6,000%. The narrative is seductive: describe what you want, AI writes the code, programming becomes as easy as having a conversation.
Claude Code calls a custom statusline command every turn with a JSON payload on stdin. The payload includes the current context-window fill percentage, model, cost, and cwd. Nothing in the contract says you can only read it, and you can fork it to anything you want while the command stays a statusline. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 4 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Quick framing for anyone new to Claude Code: it’s Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude, and the statusline is the configurable line of text it prints under your prompt every turn, like a shell prompt for the agent. You point at any script in settings.local.json, Claude pipes a JSON object to it on stdin, and whatever the script writes to stdout becomes the visible line.)
I wrote a daemon to listen to Claude Code hooks. My first version read `$CLAUDE_HOOK_PAYLOAD` and logged empty bodies for two days straight. The payload was sitting on stdin the whole time. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 1 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS This post is the five gotchas I hit while wiring up ClaudeDeck, a Stream Deck plugin (a small program that runs inside Elgato’s Stream Deck app on the USB grid of programmable LCD keys) that talks to Claude Code over its hooks system. Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude (claude in your shell), and its hooks are user-defined scripts it spawns at certain points in a session (before a tool call, on session start, on prompt submit). My daemon is a long-running background process the plugin and the hooks both talk to over a local socket. None of the gotchas are exotic. All of them cost me hours. Each one is a place where the docs were either silent, ambiguous, or contradicted by tribal knowledge I picked up from other people’s projects.