[mergesort]

Heya, author of the post here. That's a good call out because it's probably a lot!

And now that you mention it, that's also one failure case for why some people look at AI and go "this just isn't very good at coding". I'm not saying it has to be that way nor will it be that way forever, but there are absolutely a lot of people who just download Claude Code or Cursor or Codex and dive right in without any additional set up.

That's partially why I suggest people use Codex for the workshops I offer, because it provides the best results with no set up. All of these tools have a nearly unending amount of progressive disclosure because there's so much invisible configuration and best practices are changing so fast. I'm still trying not to imply that one tool is "better" than another (even if I have my preference), but more so hit on the fact that which AI tools people like is mostly about your preferred set of tradeoffs.

[MuffinFlavored]

What if I said "I don't use any of those and I think AI is very good at coding".

I'd be more interested in an article from you on how to go from "I use Claude Code out of the box" as a baseline and then how each extra layer (CLAUDE.md, skills, agents, MCP, etc.) improve its effectiveness.

[mergesort]

That does sound like a good article! Sadly I've never written it and probably won't because I think a lot of that stuff doesn't provide as much value as people assume — which is why my personal conclusion in the post is to just lean into Codex.

This isn't a value judgment, it's just a question of where my priorities and tradeoffs lie. That said, I think Skills are the killer feature because they are a very composable tool — which I'll get to in a bit.

- Your CLAUDE.md should be a good high-level description with relevant details that you add to over time. Think of it as describing the lay of the land the way you would to a new coworker, including the little warts they need to know about before they waste hours on some known but confusing behavior.

- MCP has it's purposes, but it's not really a great tool for software development. It's best served for interfacing with a remote service (because it provides a discovery layer to LLMs on top of an API), but if you use them the way developers are told to, you're almost always better off using an equivalent CLI.

- I'll skip over agents, because an agent is basically a skill + a separate context window, and the main selling point is the context window bit. I think over time we'll see a separation of concerns where you can just spawn a skill with a context window and everyone will forget about the idea of agents in your codebase.

So now Skills. I wrote a well-received post [^1] a few months ago about Claude Skills, and why I think they are probably the most important of these tools. A skill is basically a plain-text description of an application.

The app can be something like I describe where Claude Code converts a YouTube video to an mp3 based on natural language, or you can have a code review skill, a linter skill, a security reviewer skill, and so on. This is what I meant when I said skills are composable.

You can imagine a team having lots of skills in their repo. One may guide an agentic system to build iOS projects well (away from an LLM's bad defaults when building with Xcode), skills that are very contextually relevant to the team, or even skills that enforce copy in your app to conform to your marketing team's language.

Skills are just markdown so they're very portable — and now available in Codex and many other places.[^2] (I had been using OpenSkills to great effect since the way Skills work is just through prompts). I now have a bunch of skills that do lots of things, for coding, marketing, data analysis, fact checking, copy-editing, and more. As a nice benefit they run in Claude — not just Claude Code. If you have ideas for processes you need to improve, I would invest my time and energy into building up Skills more than anything else.

[^1]: https://build.ms/2025/10/17/your-first-claude-skill [^2]: https://agentskills.io/specification

[bdangubic]

> That's partially why I suggest people use Codex for the workshops I offer, because it provides the best results with no set up.

I would do the exact opposite… If we are pitching “this shit works magically without any setup” people will expect magic and they absolutely will not get magic as there is no magic. I believe, especially if we are educators (you obviously are!!) that it is our responsibility to teach it “right” - my workshop would probably spend at least 75% of the time on the setup

[mergesort]

So I definitely understand where you're coming from, but let me provide a little bit of context.

The workshops are 3-4 hours and we do spend a lot of time discussing how things work in reality vs. how they work in the context of the workshop. It's worth noting that these workshops span the gamut of non-technical people in sales to seasoned developers, so a lot of people simply won't learn much (or have the excitement to learn on their own) if we spend the first 2-3 hours setting things up.

In my experience the heaviest lift for teaching practically any technical subject is getting someone interested by showing them how to accomplish something they care about, and then leaving them with lots of information and resources so they can continue experimenting and growing even once we're done. The way I do that is to make sure they leave the workshop having built their own idea — without taking shortcuts!

Being able to use Codex to accomplish something because you spent an hour crafting a good prompt isn't cheating, it's learning the skill of becoming a better technical communicator — in a short period of time — and taking advantage of the skill you've just learned. I don't consider that magic, it's actually the core tenant of building with AI, and is very much how I work with AI every day.

I'm late for dinner so I should probably stop here, so I'll leave just one final note. After every workshop I send each student a list of personalized resources that will help them continue on their journey by demystifying things that we may have glossed over or weren't clear in the workshop — so they should be armed with the tools to take their next steps away from any magical thinking.

It's a bit hard to boil down exactly what I do and how I try to design for best hands-on pedagogical practices in an HN post I'm writing on the go — but I am absolutely open to your thoughts! :)