📬 Post from Darling Data for 10/28/2026 📬

How I Use Claude Code to Build Stuff

Chapters

• 00:00:00 – Introduction and Setup
• 00:02:30 – Opus and Fable Usage
• 00:06:00 – Agent Management and Token Usage
• 00:08:30 – Example Workflow with Opus
• 00:11:00 – Setup and Tools Overview
• 00:12:30 – Monitoring and Complex Projects

Full Transcript

Erik Darling here with Darling Data and in today’s video I’m going to talk because I get questions quite a bit about how I work and build on my free database performance monitoring tools. And so I want to share a little bit about that because it’s been a learning and growing adventure with me and my friend Claude working on things. It’s, you know, like there is a learning curve to this stuff and there are things you can do that make your life better and easier and all that good stuff. Down in the video description you will find all sorts of helpful links where you can hire me for consulting, buy my training, I guess I can even come teach you how to use Claude to do stuff because a lot of people are real dumb about it, including me when I started.

If you want to buy my training, become a supporting member of the channel or ask me office hours questions, there are helpful little things that you can click on down there that do all this stuff. And of course, as always, like, subscribe, tell a friend, oh yeah, ba-da-da-da-da-da. We’re going to, you know, go to code.erikdarling.com.

Not only can you get the free monitoring tool that I’m going to show you how I build, but also some of the stuff in this video are all Claude plugins that I built myself to help me do things better, which you can also download there. And of course, Seattle, Washington, November 9th through 11th, past Summit West, I will be out there ranting and raving about SQL Server, which is much closer to my home turf than anything else. But who knows, who knows how much longer that’ll last. We all might need to just be A8 spurts in order to continue on.

But let’s move this thing out of the way. And I’m going to talk a little bit about this. So this is my typical Claude code setup. I’ll have a few open windows. And the one cool thing about what Claude can do is agents can talk to each other across sessions.

So I have basically four tabs open right now. There’s a you can ignore the one that says past Summit West session. That one is in charge of something else.

But the one that I have up now is sort of like my general utility coordinator session. It keeps it keeps track of what all the other sessions are doing. Make sure that issues get assigned as they come in and that the queue gets worked through.

Right. So like this and this is the one that I spend the most time talking to because this is the one that basically is in charge of all the other ones. But that’s not to say that all the other ones are just doing top line work because they’re not.

This one over here is basically in charge of watching pull requests. So as the other two sessions finish working on issues, pull requests come in. This one is tending to those that that involves basically just like watching the CI run in GitHub.

And if anything fails, fixing that and then basically just seeing them through until they merge and then closing issues that are attached to them. So this one here doesn’t do a lot of work, but you know, it stays it stays busy with the with the pull requests. And then these two over here are ones that are directly working issues.

There are at any given point, you know, a bunch of issues open. And these two things are in charge of making sure that, you know, like looking at the issue, triaging it, looking at the code, building code to either make a feature or fix a bug or whatever it is. Reviewing the code changes to make sure that nothing is screwy and also testing them.

In the video that I did last week, there was the background behind me. You could see Claude actually like running the GUI on the performance monitoring tool, looking at stuff in there. That’s another part of what it does, because if I had to click through every chart graph and tab and I had to sit there and be like, how does this look?

Does this look great? Let me go. Let me go. Tell it what looks wrong. I used to have to do that and it was quite painful. How I started off using Claude was basically just like I would have one tab open and I would have this one poor agent doing everything, running out of context constantly, like working on like kind of one issue at a time.

And then I started working on, you know, multiple issues with multiple tabs open and that got turned out to be a mess until I discovered Git work trees and I could have them work separately on stuff without like the weird GitHub. Like, oh, sorry, I switched branches and overrode everything that you just did. It was real messy at first, but I’ve learned how to do some stuff.

Now, one thing that becomes really important when you work on more advanced agent coding setups is keeping track of your tokens and how much you’re spending or how much you’re digging into your Claude Max account. Or some people out there who might have two Claude Max accounts just in case, you know, like there’s a lot of stuff you have to keep track of and there’s a lot of stuff you don’t want to do. For example, like Claude has different levels of agents.

There’s like Fable, which is like like the big powerful one. And then there’s Opus, which is like the medium powerful one. And then there’s like Sonnet and Haiku, which are not very thinky. They’re kind of like soft cheese up here.

But they’re good for like easy mechanical work and they’re much cheaper. They’re much cheaper to use. I don’t recommend using them for anything that like requires like a lot of, you know, I want to say thought because they’re, you know, I thought because they’re LLMs and they don’t think.

But anything that requires a lot of effort, it’s probably a good way to think of it. So what I have set up in my repo and what you can find at the code.erikdarling.com repo in the Claude plugins folders, is you can find how I sort of route agents of the appropriate model type and thinking level to different tasks.

Like you can see in this section here, PM worker helper three has a bunch of the sub agents running. And they’re all sort of at different, they’re all sort of at different levels of stuff. So like a bunch of them are Sonnet five, you know, these ones are high thinking, but the effort level can be adjusted between like high, medium, low, depending on what they’re doing.

And you can see how much each one of these costs as far as like, you know, like for whatever tokens it’s been using. This one down here is thinking about a roll up migration plan. And so it’s using Opus on extra high because it’s got to look at a whole bunch of stuff and a whole bunch of code to figure out if it’s doing things right.

Like if it’s really thought, really thought through everything, all that other stuff. This, this window here looks very similar, right? This one has a bunch of lanes where they’re basically, well, these ones are all using Sonnet a different look.

Actually, these are all high too. I got to have a talk with these robots. They’re spending, they’re blowing their credit cards. This one here is on extra high because it’s got to think about a lot of stuff that it has to do.

But this is how I run stuff and this is how I keep track of stuff so that I kind of know what they’re all getting up to. And it took a long time to get to this setup. You know, like if I just had like one of these things, like all the anything that’s in a tab up top there, those are all using Opus.

And Claude has this advisor thing, right, that you can say, hey, if you get stuck or if you want to like double check your work, you can use a higher level model to go and like, you know, look everything over and futz about and tell you if you’re right, wrong or in between. And so all of these are Opus and they can use Fable as an advisor. But when I when they’re using sub agents, you don’t need Opus for everything, right?

You don’t need Fable for everything. They’re good for like top level stuff because, you know, like like things that the lower level agents do come back to them and then they review it and they figure out how bad of a job like the little workers did. So like when I when I first started doing this stuff, it would be like, cool, I got Opus, use sub agents and it would be like, I’m going to use Opus sub agents, too.

And then it would be like, you hit your weekly limit and I’d be like, I got three days of nothing to do that. Right. And that’s how you keep having to like, you know, buy the extra tokens like another 250 bucks. Go ahead and take it, burn it away.

Like they’re like as you get to use this stuff more, you have to figure out ways to conserve and do a better job of using the limits attached to either your your account or however your credit card bill or however you’re paying for stuff and doing things. It’s always a good idea to, you know, make sure that you’re not like using Opus to like change a file name. Right. Like there’s stuff you don’t need.

Like what’s the weather? Crappy probably. I’m in I’m in a server. It’s hot in here. Like, I don’t know. I just where’s all the water? I thought I thought we were drinking all the water in the world.

Where is it? I’m dying. So like what you don’t want to do is just have like crazy level agents doing all this stuff that they like they have no place doing. Right. Just like way too much for that.

You it’s perfectly fine to have a top level agent who’s like, you know, is less dumb than the other ones sort of directing them and then reviewing their work and then coming back to you with anything that they might need you for. For example, in this window, I’m trying to figure out how to make the continuous integration that runs in GitHub go a little bit smoother because the problem that I’m having is one that was unfamiliar to me as a database person where like, you know, something would start building and some of the tests would run and like the builds would take a long time and then a test would fail. And then they’d be like, oh, I got to fix that.

I got to rerun the whole thing is another 45 minutes. It just got to be a real pain. So I’ve been I’ve been trying to do some work to make that less annoying by like sharding stuff and like bucketing tests that take longer across like some across the different shards. So it’s not like one shard does all like the tests that take 10 minutes or something.

So that’s sort of what this this this session is helping me with at the moment. And I’ve got this little, you know, it’s got a question for me. I should go answer it before it gets mad at me.

But you can you can see up here where it’s giving me an update on session three and four. There’s nothing big. I restarted them to install an update that probably isn’t going to do much of anything.

But anyway, this is a little bit about my setup and how I do stuff. I’ve gotten some questions about it. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about it because I thought maybe if if a couple few people are asking me the question, then maybe there’s some broader interest in how I do all this stuff.

So that’s about it. I don’t I don’t have anything more formal than that. It was just sort of me rattling off the top of my head some stuff that’s on my screen currently.

Again, if you’re interested in any of the plugins or mods that I’ve built for Claude Code, they’re all at code.erikdarling.com and the Claude plugins folder. There’s a lot of stuff in there that looks like this and, you know, things that you can use to make your bigger building experiences a little bit more tolerable and easy.

And, you know, like if you’re just cracking open an agent session, like, you know, like if I were to like if I wanted to like work on something in quickie store or one of my store procedures, I would probably just open an Opus window and be like, hey, look over all this stuff.

I want to do this thing and then go, you know, like write the code for it and then test it. Right. Because I give Claude access to SQL CMD and my local SQL Server VM. So we can go and run the store procedures, look at the results, figure out if things look good, bad or ugly and say, hey, I think I’m done.

And then I can look things over and say either no, this is screwed up. You go go back to the get back in the mines or, you know, no water for you. Or, you know, like, yeah, it looks good.

Let’s, you know, do some stuff with it. And this is just, you know, that I would do that. But like working on the monitoring stuff, there is way too much to do to work like that. So my, my, my, my setup has gotten necessarily more complex over time.

But, you know, maybe you don’t have that situation. Maybe, maybe, maybe you’re stuck with some, you know, real soup brain like co-pilot. I’m sorry if you are, or any, one of those open AI models that, you know, couldn’t give you a reliable recipe for ice cubes.

I don’t know. But this, this is how I do my stuff with Claude. And now things are fairly good and fairly streamlined.

But there we are. Anyway, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope you learned something.

And I will see you in tomorrow’s video where I will try to find something else to talk about. All right. Goodbye.

Going Further

If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about: these days I have AI do the annoying stuff for me. My new video course teaches you to work the same way, and I teach whole teams in a one-day workshop. Someone still has to know enough SQL Server to keep the robots in check, and that’s what my training is for.

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