Simon Willison’s Weblog

What to try first?

Run Claude Code in a repo (whether you know it well or not) and ask a question about how something works. You'll see how it looks through the files to find the answer.

The next thing to try is a code change where you know exactly what you want but it's tedious to type. Describe it in detail and let Claude figure it out. If there is similar code that it should follow, tell it so. From there, you can build intuition about more complex changes that it might be good at. [...]

As conversation length grows, each message gets more expensive while Claude gets dumber. That's a bad trade! [...] Run /reset (or just quit and restart) to start over from scratch. Tell Claude to summarize the conversation so far to give you something to paste into the next chat if you want to save some of the context.

— David Crespo, Oxide's internal tips on LLM use