Skip to content

← Writing

engineering

Claude Code in the Terminal

· Jerwin Arnado · 1 min read ·

The terminal’s next act. Picks up the thread from living in the terminal, 2018 — the abstractions moved into a tool that reads the repo and runs the commands.

Getting it into your shell

  • Install, auth, first run. What it sees on launch.
  • The mental model: it greps, reads, edits, runs — you watch the diffs.

CLAUDE.md — project memory that persists

  • Why a project file beats re-explaining context every session.
  • What belongs in it: stack, hard rules, commands, conventions. Use this site’s own CLAUDE.md as the worked example.
  • The rule of thumb: instructions that override default behavior, not documentation duplication.

Slash commands

  • Reusable prompts as commands. When to make one.

Hooks

  • Shell commands fired on events (session start, pre/post tool use).
  • Concrete example: a formatting or guard hook. Keep it honest about footguns.

Case study: rebuilding jackwander.pro

  • The actual workflow that produced this Jekyll + Tailwind site.