9 months of Claude Code Lessons in 19 minutes

On February 24th, 2025, Claude Code released and not a single day has gone by where it hasn't been the best AI coding tool on the entire market. Since then, I have been using Claude Code 12 hours a day without fail. I've absolutely mastered it. I've built and released fullcale apps making over $300,000 a year now. And I've also built up this entire YouTube channel, over 50,000 subscribers, almost exclusively talking about Claude Code. Over that time, I've learned eight major lessons using Claude Code, many of which I've never heard anyone else talk about before. Whether you're a day one beginner or you're an absolute Claude Code professional, I promise you, you're going to learn a ton in this video and be a master by the end of it. Now, let's lock in and get into it. So, the first

lesson I learned is the extension inside Visual Studio Code is the absolute best way to get the most out of Claude Code. There are many different ways to use Claude right now. You can use it through the CLI. CLI inside a cursor. You can use it extension inside on the web. You can use it in the mobile app. They've made Claude Code very accessible many, many different ways. Out of all the ways you can use it for, and I've used it for hundreds of hours. Every single way you can use it. The extension inside of Visual Studio Code is the best experience. I've tried it. The CLI and cursor. I think most people are using the CLI in cursor to use claude code. I've had many issues with that. One is the UI is just better inside the extension than in the CLI. You can open up multiple chats very easily, switch between them. It's formatted incredibly well. It's very easy to turn on and off a lot of the features, get options like the slash commands opened up really easy. It's just a way better experience than the CLI. But the reason why I use the extension inside of Visual Studio Code specifically is I've just had zero issues with it at all. As you probably know, Cursor and a lot of these other AIDes are just forks of Visual Studio Code. So, Visual Studio Code is just going to have the most up-to-date updates and work the best out of all of them. I have a lot of time when I use the other AI IDE where the extension just doesn't open up correctly. It opens up in different places. It doesn't work correctly. I have never had a single issue using the extension inside of just your basic free Visual Studio Code. It's completely free. You don't need to pay anything monthly for it. Download Visual Studio Code for free. Get the Claude Code extension, which is right in the extension store over here on the left. You open that up. I promise you're going to have the best experience ever with Claude Code that you can get anywhere else. My second tip for you is this.

Stop listening to all the gurus. You don't need to use every single feature inside Claude Code. Every time a new feature releases, such as MCP, sub agent, slash commands, you get all of these videos, the top 15 slash commands you need to implement. Here are 40 sub, this is my favorite one. Here are 40 sub aents you need to implement in order to get the most out of Claude Cod. these outrageous videos of people implementing literally a hundred different sub aents that you manually call as you go as you're building your apps. Stop listening to all these people. I get the best experience out of Claude Code when I just keep it as simple as humanly possible. There's a lot of gurus in content that will just make up these workflows that actually don't add any value. They just complicate the hell out of everything you're doing just so they have some more content to build. But I promise you, the main message I have in all my videos and all my live streams is just keep it simple. When I'm using claude code, I'm very rarely using any sort of slash commands. I at most just use kind of clear or new conversation. I'm not setting up these complex sub aents where oh, I'm in this specific scenario. Let me spin up these four sub aents. You're just complicating things. Claude code in their main model sonnet 45 is so frigin smart it can do most of the things you do with sub aents on its own and if it needs sub aents it calls them for you automatically you don't need to create a hundred different complicated custom sub aents to get the most out of cloud code I don't use a single MCP I know there's some good MCPs out there people tell me X is great you want the most up-to-date documentation I think Sonnet 45 is so smart that a lot of the time when I say hey can you build got this new feature functionality for me. It's able to find the documentation by itself. I don't need MCPS for every single piece of documentation out there. For instance, the other day I asked Claude Code to build an app using the Kimmy K2 thinking API. This was a brand new model that just dropped literally that day. So I came here, I said, "Please build me an app with Kimmy K2 thinking. " I hit enter and it just went and found the documentation. It just searched the web and found the documentation in a second. I don't need to set up four MCP servers so that it has the latest documentation. The models are smart enough. If you are adding 20 MCPS and 30 sub aents and using 40 different custom slash commands, I promise you, you're over complicating things. For 99. 9% of people, Claude code just works out of the box. So stop listening to all the AI gurus. All you need to do to get the most out of clawed code is just tell it what you want to build and it will figure it out on its own how to build things. So tip two, keep it simple. 99. 9% of people don't need MCPS and 100 sub aents and 30 different slash commands. Keep it simple. Tell Claude Code what you want to build and it will build it for you. Just as a side note before we get into tip three, make sure to leave a like if you're learning anything at all. Subscribe. Turn on notifications. All I do is create amazing videos around using AI. Tip

number three. One of the biggest complaints I get is that Claude Code's kind of pricey and credits go by quickly. Well, here's a tip for you. I use this and this gets me like 10x more usage out of Claude Code. You want to go into your model picker. You want to select models. You do slashmodel and you want to choose Haiku. Haiku is the cheapest, quickest model for Claude Code. But here's the thing. Here's how it works. When you select haiku, it actually still uses sonnet 45 for all the planning, right? So when you're in plan mode, which is shift tab, when you make the plan, it actually uses sonnet to build the plan, but then it uses haiku to do the execution. So if I build out a feature here, let's just say add a dark mode to the app and hit enter. It's going to use sonnet to build the plan for this feature. But when I hit yes on the execution, it's going to use Haik coup for the implementation. And as long as you have a nice thoroughly detailed plan, which is what Sonnet 45 does, you don't need the most advanced models to do the implementation. Haiku can handle it really, really well. And by using it this way, Sonnet for the planning, Haiku for the implementation, you're going to be so efficient when it comes to using credits and tokens. So, you want to make sure if you're on the $17 plan or even the $100 a month plan, make sure you do model and make sure you select Haiku. You're going to get Sonnet for planning, Haiku for implementation, and that will be just as good as using the default Sonnet for everything. I promise you. Tip number four, and this might be the

most important out of all of them to be quite honest with you, and that is make the most of your time when the AI is working. I saw this tweet from Y Combinator yesterday and it literally made me sick to my stomach. They're releasing an IDE called chat ID where while the AI works, it brings up like video games in gambling in Plinko as the AI work and it shows these guys just playing video games every time the AI works. This is quite literally a the worst product ever made in history, but b the stupidest possible thing you could be doing while your AI works. 80% of the time while you're vibe coding, you're in a mode like this where the AI is building a plan or it's implementing code. And if you use this 80% of the time to do what vast majority of people do, which is play video games, get dopamine hits, scroll Tik Tok, watch Netflix, look at Instagram reels, look at thirst traps on Instagram, you are doing yourself and your app such a big disservice. Here is what I do when I have my AI working for me. While it's vibe coding, while it's bu building code, whatever it is, I have the desktop app for chat GBT open. You can have Claude, GB, GBT, Gemini, whatever your favorite model is just to chat with. Have the desktop app open. And what I do is I tell it I want it to be my co-pilot, CEO, product manager for my app. And anytime the AI is working, I'm literally talking to the AI in my desktop app and saying, "Hey, this is the feature I'm working on. What do you think? What should we add next? What should the road map look like? What should my first tweet be like? " I'll even just ask for life advice. I'll be like, "Hey, I'm thinking about picking up meditation. What's the best way to do that? " And now this makes that 80% of the time the AI is working inside Claude Code so much more productive. I'm coming up with new ideas for features. improvements for the app. I'm coming up with marketing improving my life. So instead of scrolling Tik Tok and getting dopamine hits or playing Plinko or gambling on the football game that night, you are using chat GPT or whatever AI chat model you want to use to plan and improve and get your app in a better place. If you do this and you spend 80% of the time being productive doing this, I promise you, you are going to be you're going to be so much more productive. You'll mentally healthy. If you spend 80% of your day scrolling Tik Tok, your brain's melting out of your ears. You're going to be so much more mentally healthy doing this. You're going to get so much more done. And you're going to be ahead of the 99% of your competition that just wastes their day doom scrolling while their AI works. If you want to win, you need to take this tip. Do not let yourself doom scroll while the AI works. Instead, open up a co-pilot, CEO, product manager chat and take advantage of it every single time. Here is my next

tip for you. You need to have a good Claude rules file. So, claude. md file. These are the rules that get sent to Claude with every single prompt you make. And if you have the right rule set, you're going to get so much better performance out of Claude code. Over my hundreds and hundreds of hours of using Claude Code over the last year, these are the nine rules I use. I've put in where I get the absolute best performance out of Claude where I really don't get any more issues or errors or bugs anymore. I don't get any of those nasty bug circles where you're just going around and around in circles. Here are the nine rules. I will paste them down below so you can just copy and paste them and put them into your own clawed rules file. Just as a quick overview, uh, number one, I make sure it slows down, thinks through the entire problem, and reads the codebase for relevant files, and builds out an entire to-do list for itself anytime I give it a prompt. Sometime these models are just lazy. I'm going to be honest. Sometimes all the models are just very, very lazy. This first rule prevents it from getting lazy. It makes a detailed to-do list based on all relevant files that has to follow step by step. I make it stop and give me explanations before every single little change it makes. One, this is just good for me because I like to understand how the entire app works, but two, again, this is helping the model because it's forcing it to slow down instead of being lazy and speeding through problems. It forc to slow down and explain issues to me, which actually makes it smarter itself. I say make every task and code change you make as simple as humanly possible. I have too many times have given claw a task and then it goes and it makes a change that impacts 20 other features that I then have to play whack-a-ole with to fix all the other features. This rule makes it so it keeps it simple and it only touches the code and files it needs to touch to fix any issues. Then I reiterate a lot of the important points in rules 8 to n here. Do not be lazy. Never be lazy. If your context window starts filling up, it starts getting lazy. It starts hallucinating. This prevents that from happening. No temporary fixes. I see this a lot with every AI where I'll say, "Here's an error. " And it'll do like the most temporary fix humanly possible. This makes it so only does long-term fixes that address the root cause. And again, it stresses simplicity, simplicity, so it doesn't overthink it and write way too much code. These nine rules have improved the performance of Claude by 10x. It really is amazing. So, make sure copy paste this, create a new claw. md file in your project, paste them in, and you're good to go. You'll get way better performance. My next tip fits

in with the general theme I think of this video, which is keep it as simple as humanly possible. This tip is prompt engineering is the most overrated concept in history. There are 28,000 videos on YouTube telling you how to prompt Claude the right way and get the most out of the prompting. Throw it all away. It doesn't matter. Prompt engineering is so overrated. Again, the models in the app have gotten so good and so smart. You don't need to do these complex structures of prompts, right? I see this all the time where they'll be like, "Okay, in order to get the most out of clawed code, you need to first have a context section where you explain everything inside your app. " And then you next part is you go a UI section and the next part you do a UI section where you explain in detail what you want the UI to be. And then the next part you have a database section. You explain clearly what the scheme and it gives you this crazy long prompt engineering technique. You have to do it. No, no, no. I think it's actually the opposite. You should keep these prompts as simple as humanly possible. Clog, just tell it exactly what you want to do. For example, I'm building out this AI journaling app, right? Say I want to add a folder structure to the app where I want to be able to add different journal entries into different folders. A lot of the gurus on YouTube and on X will tell you, oh, you got to use prompt engineering here. Make sure you include all the context, these 40 different structures and spin up the sub. No, just tell it what you want. I want a folder system in the app so I can put entries into folders. That's it. Hit enter. You're good to go. And as long as you have it in plan mode, so shift tab twice, it's going to figure out the context for you. It's going to look at the right files for you. You don't need these advanced prompt engineering techniques. Every time I see someone on Twitter say, "Oh, here's how to do prompt engineering. " I laugh in their face because I know they're just trying to get a little bit of engagement. There is no need anymore for prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is extinct. These models are good enough. Just tell it like it is. It will build it for you. Keep it simple, stupid. The

next tip I have for you is use screenshots as much as possible, especially for UI. My biggest issue with claude code and really every AI out there is the UI is almost always the same. It's always bad. It's a miracle you don't see any blue and purple gradients in this app that it built out. The reason why is this. I try to include screenshots with any UI change I make, right? I use screenshots of inspiration for the UI. How do I do that? One of my favorite ways to do that is through V0ero. So Vzero is another AI coding tool. They have a design system section here. If you click on design system, they have a whole bunch of designs in here you can click on and customize. If you just choose any of these and then you bring it over and you screenshot it, you can just screenshot it. You use command control shift4 on Mac that takes a screenshot and copies it to your clipboard so that you can easily just go in a claw code and paste it in here. And so if you're building out a UI, V1 of your app, you always want inspiration. This V0ero feature makes it really easy to get inspiration. Include the screenshots. Other things I like to do is I found some inspiration on Pinterest before. So Pinterest, which I thought only chicks use, apparently not. I go on there now and I search for like app designs and I find really good inspiration for app designs. So always make sure you have some sort of inspiration or screenshot of UI whenever you're building out UI inside of Claw Code because you get way better UI instead of that annoying gross blue and purple gradient you always get.

And the last tip I learned about Claude Code, using it almost 12 hours a day, every day for the last 9 or 10 months, is treat Claude like a creative partner. Not many people I talk to ask a lot of questions to Claude. I am constantly asking questions of Claude. These AIs are much at least much smarter than me. They may not be smarter than you. You're pretty smart, but for me, they're a lot smarter than me. And so I am constantly asking questions and treating it as an equal, treating it as a creative partner. So I'll do a lot of things like this. I'm not even in plan mode yet. I'm in regular edit mode. I'm saying I want a folder system in the app so I can put entries into folders. And I'll ask things like what are different options for designing this? What are different cool features we could add? And I'll hit enter on that and I'll send it. And now I'm just bouncing ideas off of Claude, right? Before I do any coding, sort of planning, I'm just saying, "Hey Claude, what are you what's your opinion on this? What would you add? What would you change? " And I do this, this is like almost a pre-plan mode. This is like a brainstorm mode. I wish they would put in this a slashbrainstorm mode where we can just bounce ideas off each other. I mean, I'm just doing it now, but I bounce ideas. I kind of figure out what I want this to be, and then I go into plan mode after. I say, "Perfect. make a plan for building that out. I love that idea. So, as you can see here, it came up with a whole bunch of ideas. There's kind of the flat categories folder system, which is what I was thinking about, but then there's also a tag based. I didn't think of that. Using hashtags to tag the journal entries. I think that's brilliant. And then you can search for the hashtags in there. That's great. Now, we just came up with an even better way to implement that feature. Uh, and then there's a hybrid approach. Best of both. I like that you have both folders and hashtags. Now I can switch to plan mode with shift tab and now I can say perfect implement number four please. Right? It gave me a menu item of ways to implement it. I choose the item I want to take. Perfect. Now we're in plan mode. Let's plan that out. You should be treating Claude as your creative partner. It's not just some junior dev going out writing code for you. It's your partner. Every app I've built, including Creator Buddy, which is now making over 300K a year, I built completely off just bouncing ideas back and forth with Claude. and it gave me such brilliant, brilliant ideas. So, to recap everything we went over, it basically comes down to this. a keeping it as simple as humanly possible. You don't need to use every frigin feature on planet Earth with claw code. Keep it so simple. Number two, don't waste your time. 80% of time using claw code is downtime. Don't waste that downtime. Talk to the AI. Get the most out of it. And three, the AI is smarter than you think. Bounce ideas off of it. Trust it. Use it as your partner and you'll get the most out of Claude Code. If you do the eight things I talked about in this video, you will get so much more out of it. Feel free to go back now, write down notes, whatever you want to do. You'll get so much out of this. Claude Code is brilliant. It's amazing. Is my favorite tool to use on a daily basis. Make sure to leave a like if you learned anything at all. Subscribe if you haven't yet. Turn on notifications. I live stream like three times a week so you get alerted on that. And sign up for the number one AI newsletter on planet Earth. It's completely free. Link down below. Alexfinn. a. AI/Subscribe will get you on it. Hope you learned a ton in this video.