My best Claude Code tips pt 4

Steve (Builder.io) • 2:59 minutes • Published 2025-07-14 • YouTube

🤖 AI-Generated Summary:

Unlocking the Power of Claude: Custom Hooks, Slash Commands, and Visual UI Integration

If you’re diving into enhancing your development workflow with AI, Claude offers some exciting features that can supercharge your productivity. From custom hooks and slash commands to a seamless visual UI experience, Claude is designed to adapt to your coding style while giving you powerful tools to streamline your projects. Here’s a breakdown of some of the coolest capabilities and how you can leverage them.

Custom Hooks and Slash Commands: Automate Your Workflow

One of the standout features Claude offers is the ability to add custom hooks and custom slash commands, all of which Claude can help you build.

Custom Hooks: You can define specific scripts or commands to run automatically before or after code edits. For example, you might run Prettier on a file before accepting changes or perform a type check afterward. Claude helps generate a settings file where these hooks are clearly defined and easy to edit.
Slash Commands: Adding slash commands is incredibly intuitive. By creating a folder named acloud/commands and adding Markdown files with natural language instructions, Claude allows you to trigger complex actions just by typing a slash command with arguments. This approach makes it simple to extend functionality without writing complicated scripts.

Memory Enhancements: Save Preferences Instantly

Claude also supports adding memory snippets quickly using the pound sign (#). For instance, you can instruct it to “always use MUI components for new stuff,” and Claude will automatically save this preference to the most relevant file.

You have flexibility here:

Global User Memory: Preferences that apply to all projects.
Local Project Memory: Preferences specific to a particular project and ignored elsewhere.

Just add these memory notes to any designated memory files, and Claude handles the rest, keeping your coding environment personalized and consistent.

Bridging the Gap: Visual UI Meets Cloud Code

While Claude’s terminal-style interface is powerful, sometimes you just want a more traditional UI—click, highlight, and edit without wrestling with escape characters or command-line quirks.

Enter the Builder.io VS Code Cursor Windsurf extension. This tool offers a visual UI directly from your IDE sidebar, giving you:

A familiar chat-like interface paired with a live preview.
The ability to switch to a design mode with a Figma-style interface to tweak styles and layout visually.
The best of both worlds by combining visual design tools with the underlying cloud code mechanics.

This tool was carefully reverse-engineered to mirror Claude’s internal system, ensuring consistency between your visual edits and the codebase.

Collaborative Prototyping and Code Review

You’re not limited to your local environment. This visual editing experience also works seamlessly in a browser, allowing team members to rapidly create prototypes aligned with your design systems.

When ready, you can generate a pull request directly from the UI, complete with title, description, and a review of changed files to ensure everything aligns with your design system.

Even better, you can leave comments within the PR like, “Hey, build a bot. Move this to its own component in a new file.” Claude responds to these comments by pushing new commits that address your feedback—automating code refinement through natural language collaboration.

Conclusion

Claude’s ecosystem is evolving into an incredibly flexible tool that blends AI-powered coding with intuitive customization and visual interfaces. Whether you want to automate workflows with hooks and slash commands, save personalized memory snippets, or toggle between terminal and visual UI for design and prototyping, Claude has you covered.

By integrating tools like the Builder.io extension and embracing collaborative workflows via pull requests, Claude is helping developers and teams work smarter, faster, and more creatively.

If you’re ready to take your development process to the next level, exploring Claude’s custom hooks, commands, and UI tools is a great place to start. Happy coding!

📝 Transcript (96 entries):

A couple other cool power features you can do with Claude is add custom hooks and custom slash commands. And the coolest part is you can have Claude build those for you. In this case, I asked for Claude to add a couple default hooks, commands, and settings and created a settings file that I can easily edit. It added a Claude MD which gives a bit of project overview and some key commands that it should know about.

And it added some hooks for what code should run before edits are accepted, such as run prettier on a specific file or after edits, like run a type check on a specific file. Another really cool one you can do is add custom slashcomands.

To add commands, just add acloud/comands folder. Add its name and then MD. You just write these in natural language and you can use this arguments string to place in arguments into the prompt and the cloud will do exactly what you asked just by typing slash and whatever it is.

Another cool one is we can use the pound sign and add memory super fast like always use mui components for new stuff and then it'll automatically save that to the most relevant file. You could also save this to global user memory preferences you want to apply everywhere or local project memory that's memory specific to you and gets get ignored.

Add it to any of these files and then it'll write it for you. Now the main problem I sometimes feel and I see people point out the most is sometimes you really just want a normal UI. It is kind of annoying that typing out long responses have these weird escape keys.

I can't just click on what I want to edit and highlight and edit. It's still very clear you're working with a terminal and that comes with some inherent limitations. For there's times where you want a UI or you prefer UI interface, but you still want the mechanics of cloud code. One trick is to use the builder.io VS Code cursor windsurf extension. At any point, you can just launch into a visual UI from your IDE sidebar. What you'll get is a much more visual interface with the typical chat dynamics that you're used to and a live preview. And under the hood, we built the system to match almost exactly how cloud code works.

This tool uses effectively the same agent and approach as cloud code down to the tiniest details. We reverse engineered it as closely as humanly possible. And then you could preview your changes quickly. Like I actually just moved items from here to right here. Perfect. And what's kind of cool is at any time we can switch to design mode and we get a Figma style interface where we can change up any of the styling we want and edit it just like a design tool. It's kind of a cool way to bridge the worlds of visual editing and code and get a bit of the best of them both at the same time. We can explore different UI patterns quickly and make precision edits and then just apply our changes to the code. You can do all this stuff from a browser interface, too, which can be really cool for letting people on your team create prototypes right with your design systems and applications. And then when you're happy with your changes and you're ready, you can just fire off a pull request. Here's our PR with a title and description. We can look what files changed. Looks like it's using our design system correctly as hoped. And I can leave a comment anywhere and say, "Hey, build a bot.

move this to be in its own component in a new file. In this world now, we're we're effectively just communicating with claude code, but through the PR directly. The agent will then reply and push up commits addressing the feedback.

And here we go. The builder bought address the feedback.

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