Seriously, just use plan mode first and you get like 90% of the way there, with CC launching subagents that will generally do the right thing anyway.
IMHO most of this “customize your config to be more productive” stuff will go away within a year, obsoleted by improved models and harnesses.
Just like how all the lessons for how to use LLMs in code from 1-2 years ago are already long forgotten.
I loved all the dumb prompt “hacks” back then like “try saying please”
Modern "skills" and Markdown formats of the day are no different than "save the kittens". All of these practices are promoted by influencers and adopted based on wishful thinking and anecdata.
Uh, this couldn't be more false. I've implemented these from scratch at my company and rolled them out org-wide and I've yet to watch a youtube video and don't consume any influencers. Mostly by just using the tools and reading documentation - as any other technical tool.
Perhaps your blanket statement could be wrong, and I would encourage you to let your mind be a bit more open. The landscape here is not what it was 6 months ago. This is an undeniable fact that people are going to have to come to terms with pretty soon. I did not want to be in this spot, I was forced to out of necessity, because the stuff does work.
Great, so how do you know this stuff works? Did you evaluate it against other approaches? How do you know it's actually reliable?
The Vercel team had some interesting findings[1]:
> In 56% of eval cases, the skill was never invoked. The agent had access to the documentation but didn't use it.
Others had different findings for commonly accepted practices[2], some you may have adopted from reading documentation, which surely didn't come from influencers.
And yet others swear by magical Markdown documents[3].
So... who is the ultimate authority on what actually works, and who is just cargo culting the trendy practice of the week? And how is any of this different from what was being done a few years ago?
[1]: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988
[3]: https://soul.md/