Yeah. Claude does good work but reviewing it all properly takes quite a bit of time. It got to the point I started having trouble maxing out my weekly allocation.
Dealt with that by going all out and making an agentic parallel code review skill. Basically an infinite TODO list generator. Now I'm definitely getting 100% of the usage I paid for. It really burns tokens like nobody's business, and catches a lot of issues while at it. I've been looping this review/fix process every week. It's dramatically reduced the amount of stuff I need to pay attention to during my human review sessions.
I really don't like how the payment plans work with the providers right now. I feel this pressure to use all my tokens for the week, often just "wasting" them. But also, I want to take advantaged of the subsidized tokens in Claude Code and Codex for as long as I can.
There is this real danger that our thinking, and the things we make, become bloated without constraints.
IMO software has gone to shit since both mobile phones and laptops mostly have massive amounts of compute. We always seem to use it to the limit, just because it's there.
It's the gacha of software development. We've got periodically resetting timers. Prompting is like booster packs: we have a finite number of dice rolls before the timer resets. We might even get a Legendary Ultra Rare pull whenever Claude happens to be feeling extra motivated. Before you even know what's happening, it's hijacked the brain's reward circuits to the point you're waking up at 3 AM because that's when the timer resets. Gotta saturate those timers with pulls and minmax everything in sight.
At least it's doing something productive instead of just sinking money into literal gambling simulators. Mercifully, unlike video games, automation is not "cheating".
Any corp (> 150 seats) has to use API pricing, so e.g. I don't have pressure or weekly limits, just a set budget I can use each month.
That will be true in March 2027, but isn’t necessarily true today. I work in a large organization that is grandfathered into the Enterprise Subscription plan until then. We have thousands of seats using Claude Code.
Oh, I didn't know about that. We got into Claude Code in AFAIR December, and we were on API pricing from the beginning.
I’m interested in how this works in practise - I guess you’ve written a skill to do code review, then your Claude.md file tells it to use it after every change as a bg task? So does this work as a background task while Claude is working on the next ‘feature’?
I just committed the skill to my dotfiles repository.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/tree/master/~/.clau...
There are many "critics", one for each quality I want reviewed. Correctness, consistency, maintainability, security, testing... Everything I could think of, and I keep adding more.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/tree/master/~/.clau...
The scrutinize skill is the entry point. The Opus I'm talking to becomes an agent coordinator. He explores and autodiscovers the project's structure, subdivides it into logical sections.
Then he runs a truly absurd critic x section matrix against the entire project. Literally hundreds of these agents running in parallel, each focusing on one area. Ten minutes of this is enough to exhaust my Max 5x five hour window and put a serious dent in the weekly usage numbers.
It literally takes days to run a full agent sweep. I designed it around the rate limiting. The agents do file system style journaling in order to resume cleanly. They commit all of their findings as they go into an orphan branch in the repository. Further review runs can build on it and avoid searching for known issues.
The way it works in practice is I just run /scrutinize sweep and then go work on something else, or just go do my actual job, live my life, play video games, write an article for my blog or something. Come back five hours later to either resume the process or check the literally hundreds of issues that have been found by all the agents. Then Claude and myself will go in and evaluate and fix all of those issues one by one. Then review again. Then evaluate/fix again. I'm just gonna keep looping this over and over until zero issues are found. For all of my projects.
Going from solo hobbyist programmer to this was pretty insane. I can only imagine what these corporations with infinite money must be doing.
Those critic skills are great. I see a real business opportunity for someone who can bundle everything you describe into a turnkey solution for a programmer like me who doesn't want to take months coming up with their own system and extensive .md files.
I'm currently, very painfully, removing a tiny bit of tech debt at a time from a massively complex project that we inherited from a 3rd-party vendor. Some of the tech debt is AI-related, some because it's a vendor who rarely has to maintain anything they create, some because when we first inherited it we had no grasp on the entire codebase and were just trying to change the plane wheels while flying (we still are).
What I'm doing now is the hardest kind of programming imo. I spend hours/week just meditating on how to chip away at this out-of-control codebase, figuring out how I can surgically remove some leaky abstraction that's spawned 5 cousins w/o disrupting the whole project. I'd be fascinated to see if the latest frontier model with a system like yours can actually help me. But I don't have the time or desire to invest the months of trial and error that I'm sure it took you to get to that point.
I used Claude Code's /insights function. It gets Claude himself to go over your sessions and usage patterns. It'll produce an HTML report that you can view.
In my case Claude saw that code review was my main activity and that I was manually and repeatedly asking claude to "review X, Y, Z..." so he suggested turning it into a skill. So I fired up the superpowers:brainstorming skill and bikeshedded it until I ended up with this heavy duty massively parallel super reviewing super claude. Refined it a bit after a couple weeks of use and the result is what you see in my repository.
Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for sharing that, I am looking to improve my agentic use, and it will be useful as I develop my own path.
You're welcome. Email me when you discover your own path? I could learn a thing or two as well. I'm pretty much a beginner when it comes to this stuff. Subscribed like two months ago.
I would love to see the codebase once you reach the zero issues point.
I would advise against it, depending on the project.
My lone lisp project gets the most love. I spend weeks reading, reviewing, restructuring and rewriting everything. It's the project where I'm concentrating all my efforts. Everything I push to master is absolutely my own work and I do want everyone to read it.
I had no trouble letting Claude take over maintenance of my static site generator and virtual machine orchestration scripts though. I wanted to care but... I didn't. I did glance over the finished product just to ensure it wasn't going to nuke my laptop the second it ran, but that's pretty much the extent of it.
I did the same thing - task oriented work, each task a md file. I have a harness based on it: https://github.com/horiacristescu/claude-playbook-plugin