How I currently use Claude Code. This is a living document that evolves with my workflow.

Environment#

• Terminal: Ghostty.
• Dictation: Wispr Flow for voice input. I have a note about interpreting phonetic typos in CLAUDE.md.
• Config managed via dotfiles repo (~/.claude/ symlinked into ~/git/dotfiles/claude/)

I use Ghostty for its simplicity, speed, and native macOS integration. I used to use tmux (see tmux + Neovim setup), but tmux adds another layer of latency and memory overhead. Now I just use Ghostty’s built-in splits: ⌘+D / ⌘+⇧+D.

My default layout is two panes side by side — Claude Code on the left, Neovim on the right. I split further as needed but try to return to this two-pane setup. Neovim is the right fit here for the same reason as Ghostty: snappy and versatile. You can quickly move around, explore files, and make edits while CC works in the other pane. I sometimes run watch scripts (e.g., auto-compile, file sync) in a tiny extra pane.

Usually I have several tabs open (one for each project) with each tab having 2+ panes.

CLAUDE.md setup#

Three layers: - Global (~/.claude/CLAUDE.md): Python/uv preferences, wiki/blog paths, project tracking conventions, academic writing style - Project (CLAUDE.md): repo-specific instructions, commands, code style

Custom skills#

I keep a small set of research-oriented skills. They include:

• math — symbolic verification with SymPy
• doi-bibtex — fetch BibTeX from DOI
• arxiv-metadata — fetch paper metadata from arXiv
• openalex-database — query OpenAlex for literature search and bibliometrics

Plus the Anthropic document-skills plugin for PDF, PPTX, DOCX, etc.

Custom agents#

My custom agents include:

• file-paper — file an academic paper to my wiki. It fills in metadata and then search my wiki to identify & link relevant papers and other concepts
• wikify — turn anything into a wiki page. This calls file-paper agent when necessary. Otherwise follow similar steps to create links to relevant pages.
• latex-cleanup — review LaTeX documents after editing
• codebase-analyzer, code-smell-refactor, security-auditor — code quality

Custom commands#

• git-sync — add, commit, pull –rebase, push
• release — bump version, tag, push, create GitHub release, publish
• uv-init — bootstrap Python/uv/direnv environment
• new-research-project — scaffold from my project template
• wikify — routes to the right agent (file-paper for papers, wikify for everything else)