Claude Code When You Don't Know What You're Doing (Yet)
About the Talk
At the DevCongress January Meetup in Accra, I shared my experience using Claude Code as a learning and productivity tool. Not as an expert teaching experts, but as someone who found themselves in the deep end and figured out what actually worked.
The talk covered 7 practical tips for developers looking to use Claude Code effectively:
- Always Plan First: Using Shift+Tab to enter Plan mode before writing any code, and going back and forth until the plan is solid.
- Understand Context Windows: How tokens work, model differences, and why context limits matter for your workflow.
- The "Lost in the Middle" Problem: Stanford research showing that LLMs struggle with information buried in the middle of long contexts, and how to structure your prompts accordingly.
- Work in Small Chunks: Session hygiene practices to keep Claude effective. Compact often, start fresh sessions for new tasks.
- CLAUDE.md is Your Memory: Using project memory files to persist context across sessions with a structured hierarchy.
- Feed Clean Context: Providing well-structured context using tools like Jina Reader and markdown formatting.
- Be the Conductor: Staying in control of your AI workflow rather than blindly accepting output.
I also covered power tools like MCPs, skills, plugins, and hooks that extend Claude Code's capabilities.
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