Skills, agents, and hooks you add to .claude/ are powerful — but they are locked to one project. Every time you start a new repo you copy the same files, maintain them in multiple places, and drift out of sync. Claude Code plugins solve this: a plugin is a shareable, versioned package that carries all your customisations and can be installed in any project with one command. This post covers what plugins are, when to use them, and how to build a real one from scratch — a DevOps helper that ships a deployment skill, a pre-deploy safety hook, and an MCP server connection to your Kubernetes cluster.

Building an AI agent that runs autonomously — browses the web, executes code, reads and writes files, persists memory across sessions — requires infrastructure. You need a sandbox, a process that can run for hours without your web server timing out, and a way to resume from where you left off after a network hiccup. Claude Managed Agents, launched in public beta in April 2026, offloads all of that to Anthropic.

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 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. Claude Code has four automation layers that let you turn it from a reactive assistant into an active workflow participant: Layer What it does When to reach for it Hooks Shell or HTTP calls that fire on lifecycle events “This must happen every time, without exception” Custom Commands Reusable slash commands for repeatable prompts “I type the same prompt repeatedly” Skills Context-aware instructions Claude loads automatically “Claude should always do X when working on Y” Subagents Separate Claude instances for isolated, parallel work “This task is noisy and the main session only needs a summary” This post covers how to create each one and when to use them.

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.

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.

There is a tendency in the AI tooling space to reach for frameworks — LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenClaw — the moment you want an AI that does more than answer one question at a time. Most of the time, that is the wrong move. The framework adds complexity, dependencies, and debugging surface area for problems that a few shell scripts and cron jobs solve perfectly well. Claude Code’s headless mode (-p flag) plus a markdown file for personality plus cron scheduling is a complete AI assistant stack.