11 Deep Claude Tips from an 18-Month Daily User

A Reddit post from a developer with 18 months of daily Claude use (including 6 months in Claude Code) shares 11 tips that go beyond surface-level advice. Here are the key technical details.

Projects Feature

Drop your codebase context, style guide, and past PRs into Project Knowledge once. Stop pasting the same context every chat. The source claims this saved "probably 100 hours."

Custom Styles

Not a gimmick. The user created a "skeptical senior eng" style that pushes back on code instead of agreeing. Took 3 minutes to set up and was the "single biggest output quality jump."

Memory Default

Memory is on by default and reads past chats. If responses feel weirdly personalized, that's why. Disable in Settings.

Search Past Chats

Search by natural language, e.g., "what was the final auth setup we landed on last Tuesday." Pulls the exact chat without scrolling.

Sonnet 4.6 vs Opus 4.7

Sonnet 4.6 is faster than Opus 4.7 and 80% as good for most tasks. Default to Sonnet; switch to Opus only for complex architectural work.

Haiku 4.5 for Batch Work

Use Haiku 4.5 for cleaning 200 support tickets, drafting 50 email replies, or summarizing 30 PDFs. Don't waste Opus tokens on these tasks.

Mobile Voice Mode

Walk for 20 minutes, talk through a problem, then ask Claude to summarize. Solved more decisions on walks than in offsites.

Claude Code: CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md does more work than prompts. Write 80 lines of project context once. Stop re-explaining your stack every session.

Skills vs Custom Instructions

Use Skills for repetitive workflows. Example: a skill that pulls the right docs based on the current file. Setup took an afternoon, pays off daily.

Subagents in Claude Code

Subagents unlock parallel work. The user does: "spin off a subagent to run the test suite while I keep coding." Most people don't use them.

Artifacts Can Call the API

You can build a working AI tool inside an artifact. The user made a client brief generator that calls Sonnet from inside an HTML artifact—took an hour.

Final note from the author: if your Claude output feels generic, your prompt was generic. "Genuinely a skill issue."