My best Claude Code tips pt 2

Steve (Builder.io) • 2:52 minutes • Published 2025-07-12 • YouTube

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Boosting Your Development Workflow with Claude and Cloud Code: A Deep Dive into AI-Powered Code Review and Terminal Efficiency

In the rapidly evolving world of software development, AI tools are becoming indispensable allies, especially when it comes to code review and managing large codebases. Today, we’ll explore some powerful features of Claude and Cloud Code that can significantly enhance your development workflow, based on practical insights from real-world usage.

Automate Your Code Reviews with Claude’s GitHub App

One standout feature of Claude is its GitHub app integration, which automates the code review process for pull requests (PRs). When you submit a PR, Claude automatically performs a code review, identifying bugs and potential security vulnerabilities. This is particularly valuable as the volume of PRs increases with more AI-assisted coding.

Why is Claude’s review so effective?
Unlike human reviewers who often focus on style nitpicks like variable naming, Claude zeroes in on actual bugs and security issues, sometimes catching problems that slip past human eyes. This focused approach helps maintain code quality without overwhelming you with verbose feedback.

How to optimize Claude’s reviews?
Claude adds a claude_code_review.yaml file with a default prompt. To avoid overly verbose comments, customize this prompt to instruct Claude to:

Look only for bugs and security vulnerabilities
Be concise in its feedback

With this tweak, Claude becomes a streamlined, powerful addition to your CI/CD pipeline.

Leveraging Claude’s Slash Commands for Enhanced Terminal Interactions

Beyond code reviews, Claude supports numerous slash commands to boost productivity:

Pull Comments and Address Feedback: Automatically pull comments from GitHub PRs and generate responses or fixes.
Terminal Setup: By default, pressing Shift + Enter doesn’t add new lines in the terminal interface. But with a simple command to Claude, you can configure it so Shift + Enter functions as expected, improving text editing flow.

Tips and Tricks for Cloud Code Terminal Usage

Cloud Code’s terminal interface might feel unconventional at first, but mastering a few quirks can greatly improve your efficiency:

Drag and Drop Files: You can drag files into the terminal. In editors like Cursor or VS Code, this opens the file in a new tab. However, holding Shift while dragging the file inserts a reference to it directly in your current workspace.
Pasting Images: Standard paste commands (e.g., Command + V on Mac) don’t work for pasting images in Cloud Code. Instead, use Control + V to paste images from your clipboard. This subtle difference took some users a while to discover but is a game-changer once known.
Stopping Cloud Processes: Unlike typical terminals where pressing Ctrl + C stops processes, in Cloud Code pressing Escape is the correct way to stop ongoing tasks. Pressing Escape twice brings up a list of previous messages, allowing you to jump back to any past interaction.
Vim Mode: For Vim enthusiasts, Cloud Code offers a Vim mode to navigate and edit code efficiently. While not for everyone, it’s a robust option for those accustomed to Vim’s keyboard-driven workflow.

Handling Massive Codebases with Cloud Code

Managing and updating large code files is notoriously challenging for many AI agents. For example, in one React project, a single component file spans a staggering 18,000 lines of code. Most AI tools struggle with such scale, often having to rewrite entire files or failing to resolve incremental changes accurately.

Cloud Code excels where others falter:
- It seamlessly updates extremely large files without hiccups.
- It handles complex tasks across massive codebases efficiently.

This capability makes Cloud Code an excellent choice for projects where legacy code or huge files are the norm.

Final Thoughts

Integrating AI into your development workflow doesn’t have to be overwhelming or error-prone. Tools like Claude and Cloud Code bring automation, precision, and scalability to code reviews and terminal interactions, making them invaluable for modern developers.

By customizing Claude’s review prompts, mastering Cloud Code’s terminal shortcuts, and leveraging their strengths in handling large codebases, you can save time, reduce bugs, and streamline your coding experience.

Ready to take your development process to the next level? Start exploring Claude’s GitHub app and Cloud Code’s terminal features today!

📝 Transcript (89 entries):

Now, speaking of slash commands, Claude has a lot. One really cool one is installing the GitHub app. This makes it so when you submit a PR, Claude will automatically do a code review. This is pretty awesome because as you use more AI tools, your volume of pull requests might increase. And I found in certain cases the AI models are better at finding bugs than humans because they frankly put more effort into it in some ways. While I've seen humans are really common to nitpick at, oh, this could be named differently and stuff like that, I've seen Claude actually find real bugs that our humans missed in a good chunk of cases. The main tip I have for this is Claude will add a claude code review.yaml. It'll have a prompt in it already. Here's the prompt I use. The original issue we found with this tool is it was really verbose. It would comment on all kinds of like nuanced, unimportant things and write a whole essay on every PR. What we really care about most for the AI to review is bugs and potential vulnerabilities. So we tell it look for bugs and security issues only report on bugs and potential vulnerabilities and be concise. The cool part is when you run this command and edit that one line, you have a pretty awesome new addition to your workflow.

There's a lot of other really cool stuff it can do like pull comments from a get pull request and address them, review a pull request and do things like set up your terminal because out of the box shift enter will not work for adding new lines. But we can just hit enter and tell it to do it for us. And there we go. Shift enter adds new lines.

Beautiful. Speaking of quirks with using a terminal interface with cloud code, you might be surprised, but you actually can drag files in. Though in tools like cursor and probably VS Code, it opens it in a new tab. If you drag in and hold shift, it'll actually pop it in and reference it like you need. Now, one thing that doesn't work is it doesn't paste images from your clipboard. So, if I do the Mac thing where I take a screenshot of this and command V, nothing happens. A special trick for this is control +v actually will work there. It pasted the image. That one took me a long time to figure out.

Another thing that took me way too long to figure out because this is not a normal UI interface is when cloud is working. I always thought to hit C to tell it to stop. That doesn't do it.

Hitting control C twice just exit entirely. Oops. To actually stop Cloud, you need to escape. And if you want to jump to any previous message, you can hit escape twice and see a list of previous messages and pop back to them.

There's a lot of invisible features like this in Cloud Code. If you want to be hardcore, Cloud also has a Vim mode, but I'm not a Vim user, so I do not use it. Now, let's talk a little bit more about

why Cloud Code is so good. In builder, we have one React component that is so large, I can barely even scroll to the bottom. It is 18,000 lines of code.

There's never been an AI agent that can reliably update this file and tell Cloud Code. When using Cursor, I have still found a lot of little hiccups. It has trouble resolving patches and has to rewrite files often. It really struggles to update extremely large files. Cloud Code has no issue updating this file, like not even remotely. Cloud code works great with large code bases and complex tasks.

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