Claude Cookbook

Gotta be honest, almost every "how to use AI" resource seems pointless to me. I'm either going to ask the AI how to do it, or if it's about using the AI then we can just bake it into the harness or wait for Anthropic/OpenAI to do it for me because they're always trivial.

All of these resources on agentic workflows, managing agent memory, harness engineering, etc. appear to just be theatre to me.

I've been using Matt Pocock's skills at home, and they seem pretty great. He makes a great case for them vs other skills in his videos. I don't remember the exact arguments, but basically they're designed to be called by the user instead of called automatically, and that makes them take less context merely because they exist.

I've also found that they tend to coerce the programmer into thinking about the end result, rather than try to push them out of that role. His grill skills are about making sure the actual requirements are known, and his prototype skill can help explore things that need to be experienced to make a hard decision on.

The before and after images in “prompting for frontend aesthetics” are hilarious. Did no one look at these to make sure the skill actually improved the design?

https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/coding-prompting-for-fr...

https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/coding-prompting-for-fr...

Before: bland

After: bland with gradients

Thanks! I also like the OpenAI Cookbook: https://developers.openai.com/cookbook

Other AI labs also tend to publish examples and cookbooks on GitHub and Hugging Face, so it's always worth keeping an eye on those as well.

I thought this is a new product to generate recipes with Claude.

Does anybody here have a frontend development workflow that works well with coding agents? In my experience coding agents ship buggy, broken, incomplete, or awkward frontend features at a way higher frequency than they do for backend features. The reason seems obviously to be the difference in verifiability between the two. Basic test suites dont seem to help much. I assume something like Garry Tan’s gstack is the right direction but I dont know if that particular tool is mature enough to adopt yet. I was surprised too see here on HN recently that gemini 3.5 flash may outperform Opus/gpt-5.5 on frontend tasks (maybe because of Gemini’s supposed edge w.r.t. multimodality? or maybe it understands Chrome more deeply?), can anyone here second that take?

After all this effort of not opening the models, then trying to forbid people to use open models and all the rubbish their CEO keeps talking about common people I am done with Anthropic.

I can't use it on good faith Same goes for grok, chat gpt and others all involved in killing people and monopolising the market.

I thought it would be a litteral cookbook on how to make plausible/feasible recipes with LLMs (we're not here yet sadly).

This is definitely controversial, but I think the best CLAUDE.MD is no CLAUDE.MD at all. Every time I found myself wanting to put information into that file, I asked myself "Why isn't this already obvious from the code itself?"

I don't need to tell the agent my tech stack, what DB access library I'm using, the way in which I write my tests, etc. Why? Because it's all very clearly spelled out within the code itself. I've gone great lengths to make sure that my fairly complex domain can be understood by a person with little domain knowledge, which means it should certainly be understood by a tool that has a wealth of it.

Somehow all the with/without cookbook design examples look vibe coded on both sides to me.

I'm not enough of a designer to be able to point exactly at what makes it so, but Claude does seem to have a somewhat limited repertoire of styles.

Maybe if you could point more precisely at the required changes, you could discourage it?

They could have done at least one pass on the UI. Can't even get simple table spacing right

Recipes like this get baked into the next iteration of a model.

I'm a bit disappointed. Based on the title, I was hoping this was going to be a list of popular recipes Claude has suggested for cooking food. It's one of the not-so-obvious use cases I have a Claude/ChatGPT. It's been really helpful for figuring out how to cook something new (for me). It is easy to ask "how do I cook X" when I have no idea of where to start. Claude has also been helpful when trying to figure out how to substitute different ingredients when I've forgotten something at the store. I've also gotten corrections in recipes, with Claude (correctly) identifying different issues that I didn't notice (like when Claude suggested adding more sugar to a sorbet too avoid having excess ice when freezing in a sorbet).

So like OpenAI's Cookbook which has existed for years and no one reads?

Immensely disappointed; I expected an actual cookbook.

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