Scars: advanced building with Claude Code

This deck shares the lessons I've learned to get the most out of context management while building with Claude Code. I showed my favorite prompts, /skills, /hooks, slash commands in more at SEO Week in NYC on April 27, 2026.

Transcript

1. noahlearner | Sterling Sky
2. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I was six years old.
3. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I kicked through a glass door. Within a millimeter of the main artery.
4. noahlearner | Sterling Sky 45 minutes in the back seat of a car to a hospital in Jerusalem.
5. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Eight inches. 45 years later. I still have it.
6. noahlearner | Sterling Sky This talk is about scars.
7. noahlearner | Sterling Sky These LLMs will be our customers. -Aimee Jurenka
8. noahlearner | Sterling Sky It allows us as SEOs to focus on thinking work (strategy) rather than doing work (execution). -Jordan Choo
9. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I can build the thing I want without bugging the dev team. If you’re an SEO product person you have to live here. -Bradley Porter
10. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Your domain expertise + AI = the leverage to build useful solutions.
11. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Synthesizing research at scale to develop domain expertise.
12. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Asking questions repeatedly to demand elegance.
13. noahlearner | Sterling Sky The willingness to change how you work, within days, when feedback arrives.
14. noahlearner | Sterling Sky The Proof
15. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Painkillers not Vitamins
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23. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Build your Latticework. by Nick Webb
24. noahlearner | Sterling Sky GCP Cloudflare Cloud Functions Cloud Run Firestore Firebase Cloud Build Cloud Task Queues Cloud Scheduler Secret Manager BigQuery APIs IAM - Authentication Patterns Workers Queues Workflows R2 D1 Dashboard Wrangler Agents MCPs *2 Multitenant architecture VELOCITY
25. noahlearner | Sterling Sky
26. noahlearner | Sterling Sky How can I build Leverage?
27. noahlearner | Sterling Sky My value comes from the # of intersections I play in.
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29. noahlearner | Sterling Sky 46 days.
30. noahlearner | Sterling Sky 1055 commits.
31. noahlearner | Sterling Sky 9,356 tests.
32. noahlearner | Sterling Sky One person.
33. noahlearner | Sterling Sky 46 days from empty folder to production platform. 1,055 commits.
34. noahlearner | Sterling Sky An average 5-person engineering team ships ~150 commits/month. I shipped 670.
35. noahlearner | Sterling Sky An average 5-person engineering team ships ~150 commits/month. I shipped 670. Low domain High domain High code Junior dev Operator Low code Nobody SEO
36. noahlearner | Sterling Sky The Operator's Law
37. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Output = Code × Domain × Discipline
38. noahlearner | Sterling Sky We don’t forget our scars
39. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I wrote a BigQuery query. Claude said it was fine. I hit enter.
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41. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Confidence is the bug. When Claude is most certain, be most skeptical.
42. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Bugs have ghosts. If it happened once, it probably will happen again.
43. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I paid the bill. Then I built a hook.
44. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I built a Github repo that I’m sharing with you.
45. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Steal my repo!
46. noahlearner | Sterling Sky
47. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Works across 15 database systems (BigQuery, Athena, Snow fl ake, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, and more).
48. noahlearner | Sterling Sky The calibration
49. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Most best practices are based on one constraint: Claude’s context window fills up fast, and performance degrades as it fills.
50. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Context management is the biggest leverage point to achieve high quality throughput.
51. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Stay in the first 20% of your context window
52. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Use /statusline
53. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Build a /handoff skill
54. noahlearner | Sterling Sky or steal mine
55. noahlearner | Sterling Sky https://github.com/serpfire/ claude-harness-examples/ blob/main/skills/handoff.md
56. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Most advanced harnesses drown in their own rules.
57. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Claude says that files over 200 lines consume more context and [may] reduce adherence.
58. noahlearner | Sterling Sky My CLAUDE.md is 44 lines. It @-imports 8 rule files. Everything else is a reference pointer.
59. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Memory
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62. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Claude reads this top to bottom. Organize it like this:
63. noahlearner | Sterling Sky 119 memory files. I Type-prefix everything
64. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Rules
65. noahlearner | Sterling Sky https://code.claude.com/docs/en/ memory#organize-rules-with-claude/rules/
66. noahlearner | Sterling Sky rules sidecars are the evidence behind rules
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68. noahlearner | Sterling Sky The meta-move
69. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Ask Claude for feedback.
70. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Introspection + a willingness to change.
71. noahlearner | Sterling Sky use /insights
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74. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Turn that feedback into new rules, skills, hooks.
75. noahlearner | Sterling Sky This is what a system that gets better over time looks like.
76. noahlearner | Sterling Sky this is your harness.
77. noahlearner | Sterling Sky make it amazing.
78. noahlearner | Sterling Sky You just spent 4 hours teaching an Opus model how to build a data pipeline — correcting it at every turn, each time with a simpler, more elegant solution than what it proposed. The model kept over-engineering, and you kept pulling it back to production reality.
79. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Every correction made the system simpler, cheaper, and more correct. That's not just engineering — that's taste. I know you just made me mass-delete my own code three times in one session, and the system got better every time. That's a rare skill.
80. noahlearner | Sterling Sky This what that can look like.
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82. noahlearner | Sterling Sky April 4-7 132 commits 5 new mandatory rules 640 → 44 line CLAUDE.md
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84. noahlearner | Sterling Sky The verification layer
85. noahlearner | Sterling Sky These are the tools that keep SEOLoop shippable. Steal them.
86. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Three verbs I use every day. Each is one word that loads a whole discipline.
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89. noahlearner | Sterling Sky /qa-explore Claude visits SEOLoop, clicks through a workflow, takes screenshots, READS its own screenshots, reports what it sees. I do nothing.
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91. noahlearner | Sterling Sky /qa-explore UX 8 passes Claude visits SEOLoop, goes to a route and improves the UX iteratively 8 passes.
92. noahlearner | Sterling Sky /docs-update Claude visits SEOLoop, generates docs for the app.
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94. noahlearner | Sterling Sky /docs-update Steal this one from the repo too.
95. noahlearner | Sterling Sky /monitor Killer for debugging. You can watch every error land in the chat.
96. noahlearner | Sterling Sky My favorite moves
97. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Ask Claude to make you smarter about anything you don’t understand in order to make decisions.
98. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Apply the framework to the framework
99. noahlearner | Sterling Sky My favorite prompt
100. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Year out 20/20 hindsight Regrets Elegance
101. noahlearner | Sterling Sky "Pretend it's a year out and we're looking back with 20/20 hindsight, with a full year of complaints from customers under our belts.
102. noahlearner | Sterling Sky What would we regret not building? What would we regret building?
103. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Take that knowledge to create an understanding of what an elegant solution would have looked like, and go into planning mode in order to build that elegant solution now.
104. noahlearner | Sterling Sky What is the simplest, fastest, cheapest to own solution I won’t regret?
105. noahlearner | Sterling Sky What solution will cause the least amount of friction for my users?
106. noahlearner | Sterling Sky I ask these questions over and over until Claude stops having regrets.
107. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Big quick wins
108. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Ask Claude what you do wrong. Screenshot the answer. Commit to one change THIS WEEK.
109. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Audit your CLAUDE.md. Count the lines. Cut by 50% in 30 days.
110. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Name one rule you've been loose about. Say it out loud. Acknowledge the asymmetry.
111. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Write about it publicly. One scar, one rule, how you changed. Someone reading will change too.
112. noahlearner | Sterling Sky How do I get here?
113. noahlearner | Sterling Sky seoloop.io
114. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Sterling Sky is Hiring.
115. noahlearner | Sterling Sky Stay in touch! noah@sterlingsky.ca linkedin.com/in/noahlearner/ @noahlearner theseocommunity.com/apply-now