Collation of Claude Code Best Practices – v2

Following up the previous post, made a v2 collating popular best practices/guides found on HN, reddit etc. Improving the process to address some of the shortcomings last time (primarily separating out general software engineering best practices - still critical and foundational, but separating them out allows more clarity on agentic coding specific best practices)

https://rosmur.github.io/claudecode-best-practices

TOC: 1. Executive Summary

2. Sources

3. General Software Engineering Best Practices

3.1. Test-Driven Development (TDD)

3.2. Continuous Quality Gates

3.3. Code Review - Including AI’s Own Work

3.4. Incremental Commits with Clear Messages

3.5. Monorepo Architecture

4. Core Recommendations by Category

4.1. Context Management (Most Critical)

4.2. Planning \& Architecture

4.3. Tool Usage \& Automation

4.4. Workflow Optimization

4.5. Production Code Quality

4.6. Advanced Patterns

4.7. Testing Authenticated Routes

4.8. Architecture \& Design

5. Contradictions \& Trade-offs

5.1. Skills vs Context Bloat

5.2. Custom Subagents vs Clone Pattern

5.3. Auto-Formatting Hooks

5.4. Planning Mode vs Manual Plans

5.5. Documentation Volume

6. Appendices