A Hands-On Course · 11 lessons

Mastering Claude Code

Get the most out of Claude Code — plan mode, sub-agents, hooks, permissions, skills and plugins, worktrees, and scheduling.

Short lessons (~5–8 min each), each with one tangible win and a retrieval-practice quiz. Built for engineers who already use AI coding tools and want the non-obvious mechanics.

Grounded in the agentpatterns.ai corpus (CC BY 4.0). Keep the Glossary open as you go.

Part 1 · The Loop

1 Plan Mode Hold the agent to read-only until you've seen its plan — so you correct the approach in a paragraph, not in a broken diff. 2 Sub-Agents & Agent Teams Hand bounded work to a fresh, isolated agent so your main context stays clean — and know the one case where that worker needs to become a team. 3 Watching the Work You dispatched five background agents and went to make coffee. Which one is blocked on a question right now — and how would you know without opening five transcripts?

Part 2 · Determinism & Control

4 Hooks & the Lifecycle Stop asking the model to remember the rule. Wire it into the lifecycle so the harness enforces it every single time — before the call, after the call, no sampling involved. 5 Permission Modes Stop rubber-stamping every tool call — and stop reaching for the bypass flag. Tune autonomy so the agent runs fast where it's safe and hits an unmovable floor where it isn't. 6 Managed Settings One drop-in file per team, composed at runtime — so security, platform, and product each own their policy without ever fighting over a shared config.

Part 3 · Skills & Plugins

7 The Skill Eval Loop Stop guessing whether your skill helps. Measure it against test cases, then reload the edit live and re-test — without burning your session. 8 Building Plugins One command scaffolds a plugin in your skills directory; one manifest key arms a watcher that runs itself every session. No marketplace round-trip.

Part 4 · Scale & Automation

9 Parallel Worktrees & Monorepos Twelve agents editing one repo at once, none of them stepping on another — because each lives in its own checkout and can only touch the files you let it see. 10 Scheduling & Cloud Routines Stop babysitting a terminal at 9am. Recurring work belongs on a schedule — and the only real decision is which machine runs it.

Capstone

11 The Claude Code Decision Table Eleven lessons collapse into one reflex: read the symptom in front of you, reach for the surface that fits — and when the job leaves the interactive session, pick SDK, bare mode, or a dynamic workflow on purpose.