Claude Code in Practice · Module 02

The .claude toolbox – Skills, agents, hooks and MCP

The hidden .claude folder is where Claude Code stops being a generic assistant and starts working the way your team works. How we split DevOps Peach into skills, review agents, hooks and connectors, and the rules we use to decide which is which.

Practice interactively →

What you will learn

• Find and organise the .claude folder: agents, skills, settings and rules
• Turn a task you repeat every day into a skill
• Give review work to a sub-agent that has not seen the work, and know when parallel agents are worth the cost
• Use a hook for things that must happen every time, and decide between an MCP server, a skill and a plain script

Lessons

1. The .claude folder and turning repeats into skills

   Agents, skills, settings and rules live in a hidden folder most users never open. Ours holds six agents and three skills, and each one started as something we typed again and again.

2. Sub-agents: a second pair of eyes that has not seen the work

   The most valuable sub-agent in our project is not a fast parallel worker, it is a reviewer with a clean context. How we use agents to write, review and audit, and when running several at once is worth the tokens.

3. Hooks and MCP: what must always happen, and what lives outside

   A hook runs every time, whether Claude remembers or not. An MCP server connects Claude to tools outside the repository but costs context on every turn. How we choose between a hook, an MCP server, a skill and a plain script.