Must-have settings / hacks for Claude Code?

I really enjoy using Claude Code, but I feel like I’m still leaving a lot of potential on the table.

My current workflow looks like this:
I start Claude in the terminal, describe what I want as clearly as possible in plan mode, iterate on the plan until I’m happy with it, and then let it execute. End-to-end, this usually takes around ~20 minutes per feature.

However, I keep hearing people talk about agents running autonomously for hours and handling much more complex workflows. I can’t quite figure out how to get to that level.

So I’m curious:
What are your most important settings, workflows, or “hacks” to get the most out of Claude Code—without overcomplicating things?

Would love to hear how you’ve optimized your setup

CmdrCallandra Still wondering why no one has mentioned get shit done yet.

https://github.com/gsd-build/gsd-2

The project description

A powerful meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven development system that enables agents to work for long periods of time autonomously without losing track of the big picture

Am on a project I created using gsd, counting towards 30k lines of code in typescript.
Had a small session at the start of the day where I defined my next milestone, what to expect, gotchas to look out for etc. Took about 20 minutes initially. Then the system wrote all down, structured it into work slices and went off for the next 4 hrs working, creating code, with test cases, checking output with playwright etc.
Of course the milestone was implemented and I still have edge cases to optimize, but overall mission accomplished.

For me gsd was a game change to pure Claude code with dangerous permissions... Mar 22 3 likes

bobo-the-merciful Very interested in GSD2 - tried it yesterday with Gemini and it just flopped straight away, so clearly tonnes of bugs to work out. I'm nervous about using it with the Claude API due to cost. Very excited though for the bugs to get ironed out - I'll run Gemini through it for sure once it feels ready for that. Mar 23 1 like

ryan_the_dev I build these skills based off software engineering books. Such better code

https://github.com/ryanthedev/code-foundations Mar 22 3 likes

interrupt_hdlr why? how? is it actually better? Mar 22 2 likes

rm-rf-rm way way too convoluted and poorly explained. Especially to be used on top of CC that has baked in much of these things. And it isnt surprising that most of it is written by Claude to begin with seemingly. Mar 22 1 like