r/ClaudeCode

Experimenting I ended up in using the mods backwards. Not to change Claude Code, but to pull a feature out of it: subscription usage and context window data, pushed to a small physical display connected over USB.

It was supposed to be a half-hour experiment. It turned into something else.

The code

The mod, the ESP32 firmware, the UI: Claude wrote all of it, on its own. For the first time since I started using AI, all I did was say "I want this" and "OK".

The CAD design

This is the part that really threw me. I gave Claude the manufacturer's dimensioned drawing of the display. It drove FreeCAD and generated the enclosure and the stand in a few minutes. I 3D printed them and the display dropped in on the first try, no tolerance tweaks. Every part fits together perfectly.

My role was the client: I described what I wanted and judged the steps and the result.

I'm not saying code doesn't need reviewing anymore. This is a desk gadget, not a production system. But that's not the point.

Until recently, this same project would have meant babysitting Claude at every step: correcting, re-prompting, fixing the CAD by hand. Not anymore.

And the jump didn't happen over the last few months. It happened over the last few weeks.

Opus 5.5 is a beast.

Software, firmware, mechanical design: three different disciplines, one counterpart, zero manual intervention.

Those of us who work with these tools every day struggle to keep up with what's becoming possible. Those who don't use them yet probably have no idea how much the world has already changed.

https://preview.redd.it/xw3364fxmoth1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=77d505505e5fe396e1e88ce92f3ce839715cd2e2

What should I be using to orchestrate agents on my mac mini. I want to schedule agents for code review and run agents across projects. Use git worktrees. Manage stuff on my phone, but I don't really want to be sending all my data to Slack or some other data-mining company. Eventually I'd like to just use open models, but Claude and Codex are still my mainstay right now.

I need to create a GitHub project using R with a large dataset. Can I do it using Claude? Would someone be able to tell if it was done by Claude?

I’m hoping I’ll be able to defend the work if I get an interview, but I urgently need a project for my portfolio and honestly don’t have enough time to build one from scratch.

Has anyone done something similar? Any advice?

Auto-compact fired between 934k and 1.003M tokens every time in my session files, and left a summary of about 16k.

Claude Code logs each compaction with the token count before and after and how long it took. I mostly run it as long agent loops on one machine, so there were plenty. 241 sessions since Jul 10, 122 compactions, 52 automatic and 70 from /compact.

Opus 5 and 5.5 fired around 1.0M, close to what the docs say for models with a native 1M window ("about 967K tokens by default"). Sonnet 5 fired at about 934k every time, but those were all in July and August on older versions.

The summary was a median 15.8k tokens, somewhere between 1.2% and 2.8% of what was there before. The first request after compacting was about 85k, because the system prompt, tools and CLAUDE.md come back on top of it. My manual compacts ran at a median 397k and kept 12.4k, so the auto ones started from more than twice the context and kept only a few thousand tokens more.

Each one took a median 111 seconds, the longest about two and a half minutes. Manual /compact took about the same, median 116s.

On current models 1M is the default on every plan including Pro, so if you've never changed anything this is what you're getting. /autocompact 500k moves the trigger, and there's autoCompactWindow in settings or CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW if you want it fixed.

In my loop sessions, which run for days, auto-compact came round a median 23 hours apart.

This is one machine and mostly agent loops, not interactive chat. I only counted tokens, nothing about what the summaries left were. Subagents never compacted at all in my logs.

If you want to check yours, the records have subtype compact_boundary and a compactMetadata block with preTokens, postTokens and durationMs, in the jsonl files under ~/.claude/projects.

Since the summary comes out around 12 to 16k either way, I'd rather run /compact myself at a break in the work than have it fire at 1M in the middle of a task.

How are you actually setting up your startup to be AI-native?

We’re a small team working mostly through Claude and Codex, where I am the technical guy. Documents live in SharePoint, meeting notes and crm in Notion, and we still need to work with actual Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. What we want is to make our company agent ready (and human of course) so that we can easier automate workflows with agents. My intuition is: data is key. If the data layer is well designed modt of the work is done as every agent will benefit from it.

I keep seeing “company brains” and LLM wikis everywhere. I digged into it and built one, where ocr models read in all data to md, sharepoint files are synced, all put in relations in a knowledge graph. Then connected it via mcp to claude/codex.

When I was done I expected fewer token costs and better quality on specific tasks done by agents. For evaluation i compared it with a very simple approach: just Notion connector (uses notions AI search) and sharepoint connector (m365 mcp, uses sharepoint search) with the same harness.

Results were a bit depressing: the simpler, less complex way was able to get almost the same results with almost the same amount of tokens used. So now I am totally confused as I see llm wikis and company brains videos everywhere hyped up. So what am I missing here?

Has building your own knowledge layer actually improved answers or saved tokens?
Mostly wondering how you keep things current, help agents pick the right document/version, and make sure new info gets filed properly. Ideally without tying everything to one AI provider or turning this into another software project.
Would love to hear what’s working in practice!

I have a personal sub and a company which gives me 1k$ in Claude tokens a month. The companies 1k tokens are unusable. I will unironically blow through it in 2 days. To have anything close to what I use in my 200$ sub a month, I’d imagine I’d need at least 50-60k a month

I have applied for the claude startup program with my legit startup, and after a couple of hours i get an email with this title "Welcome to the Claude Platform" but idk if that's the actual confirmation email. anyways i went to the claude dashboard to check and i found out that i have 100$ credit but my claude account is still on the free tier and i couldn't use claude code with an api key i generated from the dashboard.
Is that normal?

https://preview.redd.it/mehrhjz2o9uh1.png?width=907&format=png&auto=webp&s=9c7d4d34ce20fdb27d43205c5dfc5d95efc61902

https://preview.redd.it/43tznzt4o9uh1.png?width=1617&format=png&auto=webp&s=4b54321a9cca51ad75e988cc21d8e27e6583a374

When I first received the email and clicked on it, the option to claim the Claude code was visible, but when I checked again later that evening, that claim section was gone.

After my web app failed to deploy/build due to the injected code, turns out some processes have been phoning home on my development computer for a short while now :*)

Will update with any helpful information for others after I finish sanitizing my computer, rotating keys, and wringing my hands over what might have been transmitted.

Development computer is no longer used for personal activity but it used to be, so I'm praying to my lucky stars that nothing that important was taken... check your repos for suspicious force pushes to main!

(Not sure what the most appropriate flair is, but I feel like ranting and raving so rant it is)

i see people tracking opus 5.5 every day to check for nerfs. nice idea but i think there is a problem.

the test runs from one account. but your message doesn't go to "the model", it goes to some server, and anthropic decides which one. so they could put some users on a cheaper version (quantized, less thinking, whatever) and it's still called opus 5.5. like an a/b test. you would never know.

so if the test account is not in that group, results look fine. doesn't mean you're fine.

i don't know if they do this. but one account can't prove it either way. you need many accounts, heavy and light users, different countries, same tests.

i tried to post about this before but mods removed it, and my comment on the livenerf post got downvoted because people understood it wrong. so trying again.