How I'm Productive with Claude Code

Summary

It’s been about 6 weeks since I joined Tano, and this is what my commit history looks like: Commits are a terrible metric for output, but they’re the most visible signal I have. Something real changed in how I work, and the commit count is a side effect. So, what has changed? Automating the grunt work When I joined Tano, I was making every pull request by hand. Stage changes, write the commit message, craft the PR description, push, create the PR on GitHub. Standard process, it was fine. It took me a while to realize this is grunt work. I was so used to doing it that I’d never questioned it. That was the first real shift: I’m not the implementer anymore. I’m the manager of agents doing the implementation. And managers automate their team’s grunt work. Then I wrote my first Claude Code skill: /git-pr. It does everything I used to do, except it does it better. The PR descriptions are more thorough than what I’d write, because it reads the full diff and summarises the changes properly. I’d gotten so used to the drudgery that I’d stopped noticing it was drudgery. The time saved matters, but the real unlock was the mental overhead removed. Every PR used to be a small context switch: stop thinking about the code, start thinking about how to describe the code. Now I type /git-pr and move on to the next thing. Killing the wait Reviewing changes had this annoying loop. Preview changes locally, go away from what I’m working on, kill the dev server, restart it on the new branch, check it all works, review the code. The server build took about a minute, which was agonisingly long when I was mid-context-switch. Long enough to break focus, too short to do anything useful. I switched the build to SWC, and server restarts dropped to under a second. This sparked joy. It sounds like a small change. It wasn’t. Sub-second restarts mean you never leave the flow. Save a file, the server’s already up, check the preview. There’s no gap where your attention drifts. It’s the difference betwe...