Habits & Guardrails
Power tools reward a routine.
None of this is fear. It's the same relationship you have with a car: enormously useful, worthy of seatbelts. Six habits, learned once, running quietly forever.
1 · Read the sentence before you say yes
Permission prompts are Claude asking, in one sentence, for consent to do something consequential. The habit is simply to read the sentence. Most are routine — approve and move on. Slow down for the verbs delete, overwrite, and publish, and for anything touching an account or service you didn't expect. If you don't understand a prompt, ask: "what does this do, and what happens if I say no?" Never approve your way past confusion.
2 · Keep secrets out of the conversation
Passwords, banking details, client confidences, API keys — none of it belongs pasted into a session. If a project genuinely needs a key (say, a service your site talks to), tell Claude: "this needs a key — set it up so the key itself never appears in the files or the chat." There are proper containers for secrets, and Claude knows how to use them; your job is only to insist that it does. This matters double because your files get pushed to GitHub, and a secret committed to a repo is a secret with a history.
3 · Commit early, commit often
Commits are your undo. Claude makes them as it works, but the habit worth owning is asking for one before anything risky: "commit what we have, then let's try the redesign." That sentence turns any experiment into a free roll — if you hate the result, "put it back the way it was before the redesign" is a complete instruction, and the repo's history makes it real.
4 · Trust, then look
When Claude says "done — everything works," believe it the way you'd believe a talented new hire: warmly, and with your own eyes. Open the preview. Click the links. Look at the page on your phone. Skim the document it produced. Ninety percent of the time the look costs you two minutes and confirms good news; the other ten percent, you just caught the thing that would have embarrassed you in public. The one rule I never break: nothing gets published without my eyes on it first.
5 · Keep sessions crisp
One task, one session, roughly. Fresh sessions are free, and a focused conversation gets better work than a sprawling one — long, wandering sessions cost more usage and more confusion. If a session starts going in circles — fixes that unfix each other, explanations that stop making sense — don't argue with it. Start a fresh session on the same repo, describe where things stand, and continue. The project remembers everything through its files and history; the conversation doesn't need to.
6 · Know what you're spending
Claude Code runs on your plan's usage, and it spends faster than chat because it's doing more. You don't need to micro-manage it. You need two reflexes: crisp briefs (a clear ask lands in one round instead of four), and a glance at your usage when a session has run long. Ambition costs; wandering wastes.
Claude Code can act on the wider world — accounts, services, live websites — and it can read instructions embedded in files and pages it processes. So: don't grant access you don't understand, and don't point it at content you don't trust while it holds that access. If it proposes something you didn't ask for and can't explain, stop and ask why. You are the accountable party in the room — that's not a burden, it's the job description, and it's the same one you already hold everywhere else in your life.
The pre-publish checklist
Two minutes, every time something goes public:
- Looked at it. Every page, in the preview, with my own eyes.
- Phone check. Opened it narrow — nothing broken, nothing unreadable.
- Clicked the links. Navigation, buttons, outbound links — all live.
- Read my own words. Names spelled right, prices current, claims true.
- No secrets aboard. Nothing private in the text, the files, or the repo.
- Committed and pushed. The version going live is saved in history.
Careful is not the opposite of bold. It's what makes bold repeatable.