The Codemap Skill

Up to now Claude has been guessing. It knows we are in VS Code and nothing else. No direction, no goal, no idea why I am here. Time to fix that.

I write a CLAUDE.md. Two parts.

First, the idea. This is my personal fork. I am adding visual elements to help me write high quality code, and I will scope those out later. For now the job is to rip out Copilot and anything that looks or smells like Copilot. Every AI feature goes. I want the file browser, some diff tools, maybe extensions.

I notice there is already an agents.md in there, which is the agent instruction file, and Claude might read it. It is my branch. I get to delete things.

Second, a response style. I drop in a snippet I call desert mode: tokens are water. It is a bit extreme and you can make the obvious joke, that I am spending tokens to tell it not to spend tokens. Fair. But it lasts the whole session, so it pays for itself. I could just write "be terse, bullet points only" and get most of the way there. I want to play with the fun version first.

Quick tangent for anyone new. /clear wipes your context so tokens do not pile up across a session and turn into a bill. I do it constantly. And YOLO is my alias for bypass permissions, which is just do the work. I run in it more than 90% of the time. The exception is plan mode.

Even with a million token window, I do not trust a big context. The bigger it gets, the more hallucinations show up. Keep it small.

Now the map. There is a codemap skill, described as token efficient navigation of large codebases, meant to be used before you explore or grep broadly. Before running it I ask Claude who wrote it, because I have a lot of skills installed globally and I genuinely cannot remember which are mine. It is from Anthropic. Their skills are good, so it gets first shot.

It takes a while and runs a pile of Python to inspect things. Out comes a .codemap directory: MAP.md, recipes, a glossary. The recipes are how you use it, like "add a new workbench feature."

I am not sure I know how to use all of it yet, and I am not sure one map is what I want. So I leave it in place and go build a second one, with a cheaper model, and see which is better.