If you're using Claude Code and you don't know about these three things, you're using maybe 10% of what you're paying for.

If you're using Claude Code and you don't know about these three things, you're using maybe 10% of what you're paying for. First one is sub-agents. So normally when you ask Claude to research something or do a big task, it eats up your entire context window and once that's full, your session starts losing memory and everything degrades. But if you tell Claude to spin up a sub-agent, it creates a completely separate instance that goes and does all the heavy work on its own. Your main session only gets back the summary. Instead of losing 10% of your context in one research task, you lose 0.5%. So next time try to type spin up sub-agent to research this. It handles the rest because the main session stays completely clean. Second thing is context management. Most people have no idea what's actually eating their context window until the session starts breaking. But if you type /status, you get a color coded line that shows you exactly how full your context is in real time. Green means you're good, orange means you slow down, and red means you need to clear something out. Then if you type /context, it breaks down exactly what's taking up space. Your system prompt, your MCP servers, your conversation history, you can decide what to cut out. And the third one, honestly it's the best one. So you can set up hooks that automatically match your prompt to the right skill without you telling it which one to use. I have skills for research, for writing scripts, for building products, for analyzing competitors. And instead of me saying use the research skill every time, there's a small script that watches what I type, loads the right skill automatically. So in this case you just type what you need and Claude Code already knows which skill to use, which files to read and how to approach it. In this case you don't manage anything, but the system manages itself. So these three things together are why my Claude Code sessions feel like I have a co-founder sitting next to me instead of a chatbot that forgets everything. If you want to see how I set these up, follow along for more.