RefBoris Cherny's Claude Code Tips

Boris Cherny's Claude Code Tips

Boris Cherny's Claude Code Tips

Thread of tips for using Claude Code from Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code), sourced from the Claude Code team — February 1st, 2026.

Boris Cherny thread

Opening

"I'm Boris and I created Claude Code. I wanted to quickly share a few tips for using Claude Code, sourced directly from the Claude Code team. The way the team uses Claude is different than how I use it. Remember: there is no one right way to use Claude Code – everyones' setup is different. You should experiment to see what works for you!"

The Tips

1. Do More in Parallel

The single biggest productivity unlock: Spin up 3–5 git worktrees at once, each running its own Claude session in parallel.

How the team does it:

  • Most of the Claude Code team prefers worktrees (reason @amorriscode built native support into Claude Desktop app)
  • Boris personally uses multiple git checkouts
  • Some name their worktrees and set up shell aliases (za, zb, zc) to hop between them in one keystroke
  • Others have a dedicated "analysis" worktree only for reading logs and running BigQuery

Reference: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/common-workflows#run-parallel-claude-code-sessions-with-git-worktrees

2. Start Every Complex Task in Plan Mode

Pour your energy into the plan so Claude can 1-shot the implementation.

Strategies from the team:

  • One person has one Claude write the plan, then spins up a second Claude to review it as a staff engineer
  • When something goes sideways, switch back to plan mode and re-plan. Don't keep pushing.
  • Explicitly tell Claude to enter plan mode for verification steps, not just for the build

3. Invest in Your CLAUDE.md

After every correction: "Update your CLAUDE.md so you don't make that mistake again."

Key insights:

  • Claude is eerily good at writing rules for itself
  • Ruthlessly edit your CLAUDE.md over time
  • Keep iterating until Claude's mistake rate measurably drops

Advanced strategy: One engineer tells Claude to maintain a notes directory for every task/project, updated after every PR. They then point CLAUDE.md at it.

4. Create Your Own Skills and Commit Them to Git

Reuse across every project.

Tips from the team:

  • If you do something more than once a day, turn it into a skill or command
  • Build a /techdebt slash command and run it at end of every session to find and kill duplicated code
  • Set up a slash command that syncs 7 days of Slack, GDrive, Asana, and GitHub into one context dump
  • Build analytics-engineer-style agents that write dbt models, review code, and test changes in dev

Reference: https://code.claude.com (skills documentation)

5. Claude Fixes Most Bugs by Itself

How the team does it:

  • Enable the Slack MCP: Paste a Slack bug thread into Claude and just say "fix." Zero context switching required.
  • CI failures: Just say "Go fix the failing CI tests." Don't micromanage how.
  • Distributed systems: Point Claude at docker logs to troubleshoot — it's surprisingly capable at this.

6. Level Up Your Prompting

a. Challenge Claude

Say "Grill me on these changes and don't make a PR until I pass your test." Make Claude be your reviewer.

Or, say "Prove to me this works" and have Claude diff behavior between main and your feature branch

b. After a mediocre fix, say:

"Knowing everything you know now, scrap this and implement the elegant solution"

c. Write detailed specs and reduce ambiguity before handing work off

The more specific you are, the better the output

d. Route permission requests to Opus 4.5 via a hook

Let it scan for attacks and auto-approve the safe ones (see https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#permissionrequest)

7. Terminal & Environment Setup

Terminal: The team loves Ghostty!

  • Synchronized rendering
  • 24-bit color
  • Proper unicode support

Claude-juggling:

  • Use /statusline to customize your status bar to always show context usage and current git branch
  • Color-code and name your terminal tabs
  • Some use tmux — one tab per task/worktree

Voice dictation: You speak 3x faster than you type, and your prompts get way more detailed as a result. (Hit fn x2 on macOS)

Reference: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/terminal-config

8. Use Subagents

a. Append "use subagents" to any request where you want Claude to throw more compute at the problem

b. Offload individual tasks to subagents to keep your main agent's context window clean and focused

9. Use Claude for Data & Analytics

Ask Claude Code to use the "bq" CLI to pull and analyze metrics on the fly. We have a BigQuery skill checked into the codebase, and everyone on the team uses it for anlytics queries directly in Claude Code.

Personally, I haven't written a line of SQL in 6+ months.

This works for any database that has a CLI, MCP, or API.

10. Learning with Claude

A few tips from the team to use Claude Code for learning:

a. Enable the "Explanatory" or "Learning" output style in /config to have Claude explain the why behind its changes

b. Have Claude generate a visual HTML presentation explaining unfamiliar code. It makes surprisingly good slides!

c. Ask Claude to draw ASCII diagrams of new protocols and codebases to help you understand them

d. Build a spaced-repetition learning skill: you explain your understanding, Claude asks follow-ups to fill gaps, stores the result

Key Principles

From the 10 tips, several principles emerge:

  1. Parallelism is power - The #1 productivity unlock
  2. Planning beats iteration - Invest in the plan, get 1-shot implementations
  3. Self-improvement through CLAUDE.md - Let Claude write rules for itself
  4. Automation through skills - If you do it twice, make it a skill
  5. High-level direction - "Go fix the failing CI tests" not step-by-step
  6. Challenge and verification - Make Claude prove it works
  7. Voice > typing - 3x faster, more detailed prompts
  8. Subagents for scale - Offload and keep main context clean
  9. Data & analytics - Haven't written SQL in 6+ months (use CLI/MCP/API)
  10. Learning modes - Explanatory output style, HTML presentations, ASCII diagrams, spaced-repetition

Context

  • Author: Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code
  • Source: Claude Code team's actual practices
  • Emphasis: "No one right way" — experiment to find what works for you
  • Engagement: Massive (8.9M views, 103K bookmarks) — clearly resonated with community
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