Devops Monk

Most AI assistants are chatbots. You ask, they answer, the interaction ends. The interesting shift happening right now is treating AI as an autonomous worker — something that runs on a schedule, produces real artifacts, and delivers results without you being in the loop. This post walks through building that kind of assistant: a background agent that runs weekly, researches a set of topics relevant to your work, and delivers a structured briefing via Telegram or email.

Most stock screeners cost $30–$200 per month. Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000 per year. I built something that does a meaningful fraction of what those tools do — analysing 220+ UK and US stocks every hour, scoring them across six dimensions, detecting bearish warning signals, running insider trading checks via SEC EDGAR, and presenting everything in a React PWA — at zero ongoing cost. The platform is live at share.devops-monk.com. The full source is at github.

Tools like ESLint, Semgrep, and Bandit catch what they are programmed to find: known patterns, common injection strings, deprecated API calls. They are fast, reliable, and deterministic. They are also blind to anything that requires understanding what your code is supposed to do. Claude Code operates differently. It reads code the way a human security researcher would — tracing data flows across files, understanding business logic, and reasoning about what could go wrong given the specific context of your application.

Most teams use Claude Code reactively — they type a prompt, Claude responds, they type another. That is fine, but it leaves significant value on the table. Hooks, subagents, and piping let you build Claude into your workflow so that it works with your tools rather than alongside them. Hooks: Making Claude Anticipatory A hook is a shell command, script, or HTTP call that fires automatically when Claude Code reaches a specific lifecycle point.

Claude’s computer use capability — the ability to see your screen and interact with applications via mouse clicks, keyboard input, and scrolling — is one of the most discussed features in the AI space. It is also one of the most misapplied. The correct mental model is not “Claude can now automate everything on my screen.” It is “Claude now has a flexible fallback layer for tasks that do not have a structured API integration.

If you have been using Claude in a browser tab to help with code, you are leaving most of its capability on the table. Claude Code CLI brings the full power of Claude directly into your terminal — it reads your actual codebase, runs real commands, edits files, commits code, and integrates with every tool in your DevOps stack. This guide covers everything from installation to advanced patterns that most engineers never discover.

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem has exploded. There are now hundreds of servers covering everything from Notion to Neo4j. Most of them you do not need. Installing too many slows responses, adds debugging overhead, and inflates your context window with tool definitions that never get used. This guide applies a simple filter: only install a server if it saves your team more than five minutes per day. For a DevOps or platform engineering team, that bar eliminates most of the ecosystem and keeps a short, high-value list.

Token usage with Claude Code follows a frustrating pattern: costs are not spread evenly — they cluster around a handful of bad habits. Most developers using Claude Code daily are burning 40–60% more tokens than they need to, simply because of how they phrase prompts, what they put in CLAUDE.md, and which model they reach for by default. This guide covers five concrete changes that make an immediate difference. Why Tokens Are Worth Caring About Every message you send in a Claude Code session includes:

The /loop command in Claude Code lets you schedule a prompt to repeat at a regular interval within an active session. It is one of the less-documented features, and it is also one of the most misunderstood — particularly around what it cannot do. This post explains what /loop actually is, the three scenarios where it genuinely earns its keep, and where cron jobs remain the better choice. What /loop Does /loop 5m check if the Vite dev server is still running and report any new errors This runs the prompt immediately, then repeats it every 5 minutes for the duration of your session.

Every CLAUDE.md file gets loaded into context on every session. Most teams treat it like documentation — a place to describe the project, list the tech stack, explain what the tests do. That is the wrong mental model and it is why most CLAUDE.md files are both too long and too ineffective. CLAUDE.md is behavioral programming. Its job is to change how Claude makes decisions, not to describe facts that Claude can read from the codebase itself.