Recipes for Claude Code — not vibes.
Practitioner-tested patterns for Claude Code — hooks, subagents, skills, MCP servers, settings.json, CLAUDE.md, and the workflows that wrap them. Every recipe ships with the JSON, the timings, and the failure modes from real use, so you can copy what works and skip what didn't.
What is Agent Cookbooks?
Agent Cookbooks is a practitioner blog about Claude Code and the broader AI-agent stack — MCP, hooks, subagents, skills, and the configurations that hold them together. Every post is built around a real artifact: a working hook, a measured cost, a documented failure mode. No paraphrased docs, no five-tips listicles, no AI-generated filler. If you ship with Claude Code daily and you'd rather see the JSON than read another listicle, this is for you.
Latest recipes
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A Claude Code hook that calls Haiku 4.5 to judge every content edit
A PostToolUse hook that sends every content edit to Haiku 4.5 for an editorial-bar verdict. The config, the rubric, the prompt-caching floor — bill TODO.
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Claude Code hooks for code quality: a frontmatter guard on every Edit
A PostToolUse hook validating blog and skill frontmatter against the same zod shape Astro uses at build. Real config, two live blocks captured.
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Claude Code harness in 30 minutes: three skills, what each one found
15 transcripts scanned, 1 permission survivor, 5 misplaced allow rules found, 2 remote agents scheduled: what three harness skills found in 30 minutes.
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Claude Code PostToolUse hook: log every skill activation
A PostToolUse hook on the Skill tool: appends a stub to receipts-drafts/. The config, the Node script, and the watcher quirk that took a restart.
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/copy-editing vs /humanizer on the same post: only one made changes
Two skills on the same 65-line technical post: copy-editing made 4 edits, humanizer made 0. The negative result and the decision rule it produces.
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Three SEO skills on a pre-launch Astro site: what each one caught
Three SEO skills, one pre-launch Astro site, no live URL: title fixed in 3 minutes, full-site scored at 82/100, content E-E-A-T at 65/100.
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Claude Code hooks: a starter recipe with real config
One Claude Code hook, the actual JSON, what it blocks, and the two failure modes I hit. The full cookbook ships after 12 hooks in production.