From the end of a 3 part series by Sam Ruby Disciplined use of Claude
Reading Reddit and other places, I see lots of people have had problems with Claude, mostly rate limiting and hallucinations. This most definitely has NOT been my experience. I’m on the Claude Max 5x plan, I’ve used it hard for several months with no issues, particularly since Sonnet 4.5 was released. Many have identified strategies making use of various tools and agents. Other than creating a CLAUDE.md file and starting to experiment with skills, I have done none of this.
What I bring to the equation is domain area expertise and discipline. What Claude brings is a broader area of expertise and raw speed, both in analyzing and coding. As I mentioned, others employ various tools to make Claude take a more disciplined approach, Sequential Thinking seems highly recommended, but as I said, I have not had any need or experience with any of this.
The components of discipline are simple: plan, document, and test.
As I’ve been getting in more reps with Claude Code, I’ve independently followed a similar trail to Ruby. I spend a significant amount of time creating plan documents, having the coding agent generate plans along with implementation summaries, and making the agent process error messages to create tests. Helpful confirmation since he’s a way better developer than I am.
Apropos of nothing, feels like I’ve been reading Sam’s work for ages. He was a very early, high quality tech blogger, especially around RSS. He seems to have come back to the trade after exiting a stint with fly.io which is great. Courtesy of him, TIL about Vector. That’s for another post though.