Claude-Code

Agents accumulate autonomous behaviors over time - ‘always do X before Y’, ‘if you see Z then do W’. These instructions eat context budget, drift across invocations, and can’t be observed or tested. How to recognize when an autonomous behavior is a skill waiting to be extracted, and the layered model that makes the boundary clear.

Claude Code agents write code fast. Too fast to catch quality issues in real-time. Here’s how to build validation directly into agent workflows using hooks and team coordination - micro validation after every file write, macro validation before completion, and independent review from validator agents.

The Scaffold Agent doesn’t add capability. It restores a review gate that was cosmetically present but structurally absent. The worktree isolation trip wire catches failures that were invisible until merge time. Neither fixes a bug in the traditional sense. Both fix trust.

Scout-and-wave v0.1.0 worked. Then we ran it on documentation agents, measured the overhead honestly, and learned that raw agent count is a bad proxy for when parallelism is worth it. This post covers the audit-fix-audit loop, the dogfooding experiment that confirmed SAW was 88% slower than sequential for that job, SAW Quick mode for small disjoint work, and the bootstrap problem for new projects.

The scout refused to write the IMPL doc. Forty-five percent of agents arrived at work already done. The skill file grew to 400 lines with no separation of concerns. Each failure drove a specific fix — and each fix is traceable to an exact incident in an exact run. This is the scout prompt’s bug tracker.

Naive parallel agents step on each other. The scout-and-wave pattern solves this by front-loading dependency mapping: one throwaway agent identifies seams and builds a living coordination artifact before any implementation begins. Development then proceeds in waves, each consuming and updating the artifact for the next.

Start on Mac, continue on Linux–same Claude conversation. Plus integrated AWS/Rust/Go/Python tools, extensible hooks, multi-vault secrets, and modular architecture. A framework, not just dotfiles.

I work on OSS projects, client work, and employer projects. Each needs different Claude Code configuration. Here’s how I stopped manually editing CLAUDE.md every time I switched contexts.