I've been playing with Claude Code the past few days. It is very energetic and maybe will help me get over the hump on some long-standing difficult problems, but it loses focus quickly. Despite explicit directions in CLAUDE.md to build with "make -j8" and run unit tests with "make -j8 check", I see it sometimes running make without -j or calling the test executable directly. I would like to limit it to doing certain essential aspects of workflow with the commands I specify, just as a developer would normally do. Are "Hooks" the right answer?
Maybe a good way to think about this is that humans like usability/automations because even through we can handle more complicated manual operations, "abstracting away" certain operations helps us free up context. E.g. I like to be able to press F5 to reconfigure, build, run and attach debugger automatically from the IDE. If I had to manually to all this every time it would really clog up my context. So maybe try to make things easier for the AI.
Another example, it was messing up string dictionary keys all the time, even after CLAUDE.md etc. I realised, if it's annoying for the human to get dictionary string keys right (for humans it's error prone, humans prefer constants or propterties that will give instant feedback by the IDE if there is a typo). Ideally Claude would have an MCP which linting/indexing. E.g. if it edits a source file, without building/running it instantly receives errors by the editing tool. And Claude should ideally have some kind of code index in its context in the same way my indexer for Java/C++/TypeScript etc probably has a cached index of all symbols somewhere, allowing instant error detection. Maybe even running a fast language server MCP on each line edit may help claude.
Specifically regarding make -j8, I think an IDE MCP would help, where it should provide the same amount of ergonomy has a GUI IDE provides; e.g. quick shortcuts for common actions such as search, find-replace, build and even debug/set breakpoint, find references. Currently Claude is grepping, which works.
Is there an IDE-MCP somewhere; with language server support? That would be quite something!
The AI definitely gets confused when there is a lot of stuff happening. It helps if you try to make the commands as easy as possible. Like, change 'make' so that '-j8' is default, or add scripts like make-check.sh that does 'make -j check', or add an MCP server that has commands for the most common actions (tell the AI to write an MCP server for you).
Hooks would probably help, I think you could add a hook to auto-reject the bot when it calls the wrong thing.
