Tips & tricks

Small mechanics worth knowing on purpose, plus where to go deeper than this site can. Every link below was checked before it went in this page — see the note at the end of this guide for why that matters more than usual with AI-generated documentation.

Toggling permission modes

Shift+Tab is identical on macOS and Windows/Linux — there’s no platform-specific bind — but it cycles permission modes rather than toggling a single switch: Manual → Accept Edits → Plan → Auto → back to Manual. Auto sits last in the cycle, so reaching it from Manual takes three presses, not one. (On a Pro, Max, or Team plan, a new terminal session already starts in auto mode as of August 2026 — check permissions.defaultMode in .claude/settings.json if a session isn’t starting where you expect.) That’s also why the day-in-the-life setup passes claude --permission-mode auto at startup rather than relying on the toggle: one flag beats three keystrokes per new worktree terminal, and it’s the only way in on plans — Enterprise, API-key accounts — whose built-in default is still Manual.

This is worth reaching for, not just a convenience: Anthropic’s own numbers are why. Their classifier caught more dangerous actions than developers did approving prompts by hand, held up under third-party red-teaming, and cut serious unintended harm from 6.3% of manually-approved sessions to 2.4% of auto-mode sessions at production severity (Auto mode is now the default, Running auto mode in production). Internally it’s the same shift this template’s worktree setup is built around — less turn-by-turn approval, more monitoring: max consecutive tool calls per session rose 116% and human turns per transcript fell 33% in one internal study (How AI is transforming work at Anthropic), and session length before stopping nearly doubled in three months in another (Measuring AI agent autonomy in practice). If the classifier blocks something routine over and over, that’s usually missing context about your infrastructure, not a wrong call — /feedback reports it, and an admin can add trusted repos/hosts via autoMode.environment.

Plan mode

Enter it with Shift+Tab or by prefixing a single prompt with /plan. Claude reads and explores but won’t edit until you approve. When the plan is ready:

• “Yes, and use auto mode” approves it and goes straight into auto-mode execution (see above) — the fastest path from design gate to implementation.
• Ctrl+G opens the proposed plan in your default text editor so you can rewrite it by hand before Claude proceeds, rather than only approving or asking for changes in-chat.

This is the mechanism behind the “plan before code” row in the best-practices table, and behind the /architect → /ux-design gates in the fast-path table in CLAUDE.md — those skills produce the plan; Plan mode is how you review it before anything gets edited.

Learning resources

Nobody should have to reverse-engineer this template’s conventions from the diff of a generated migration. These are the primary sources this site’s own conventions are drawn from.

Claude Code

Resource	What it’s for
Claude Academy — Claude Code 101, Claude Code in Action	Anthropic’s own free, self-paced courses (Skilljar-hosted). 101 covers the agentic loop, context, and the explore → plan → code → commit workflow; in Action covers steering long hands-off sessions, hooks, headless mode, and packaging skills for a team — the material this template’s harness assumes
Full course catalog	The broader Anthropic Academy catalog beyond Claude Code — AI Fluency, MCP, API fundamentals, cloud-platform tracks
Claude Code docs	Reference for everything this site only summarizes: permission modes, hooks, skills, subagents, settings
Claude Code best practices	Anthropic’s own engineering write-up — the source for most of the best-practices table
Claude Cookbooks	Copy-able recipes for building with Claude beyond Claude Code itself (tool use, RAG, evals, prompt caching) — useful once a project’s own product also calls the API

Git & GitLab — this template assumes comfort with both; neither is optional once you’re past /kickoff

Resource	What it’s for
Pro Git	The free, official Git book — start here for branching, merging, and rebasing if scripts/wt’s worktree model feels unfamiliar
git-scm.com/docs and gittutorial	Git’s own command reference and shortest official tutorial
Learn Git — GitLab Docs	GitLab’s guided tutorials (first commit, rebase, rewriting commit messages, remotes) using the same glab-flavored workflow this template’s Git conventions assume

Note

Every link above was fetched and checked against its live content before being added to this page — not taken on an AI assistant’s word, including Claude’s own. If you’re using an AI assistant to extend this site or any other doc in this template, treat that as the standard, not the exception: a fluent, well-formatted citation list is not evidence it was verified, and a model asked to find supporting sources for a claim it’s already committed to will often find some — real ones, misapplied, as easily as invented ones.