Projects · Tooling
Working with Claude Code
I study economics, and most of my time goes to research and writing. Claude Code, a command-line coding assistant, is one of the tools I use along the way. This page is how I run it.
Where it fits
Underneath my research it's a tool, no different in kind from the reference and search tools I'd reach for anyway. It has no hand in the economics or the writing. Those are mine.
How I run it
The difference is in how the tool gets run. I don't type a request and take whatever comes back. Work starts from a plan and a written spec, and the harder parts get split off to different models. It all runs against rules I set in advance, so nothing irreversible happens unchecked and the tool can't skip the reviews it owes. I also keep a retrospective check on the ways I might route around those rules myself.
Building that structure is most of the effort, and it looks more like planning research than writing code.
In the research
In the research itself I keep it on a short leash. It checks references and does the legwork around an analysis. It also runs several independent passes over a draft, each arguing against it, which I then reconcile myself. When I'm tracing something like how a central bank's signal moves a currency, that leaves me free for the argument.
Still a tool
None of this is fixed. I change the setup constantly, and some of the rules I added I've since had to loosen when they got in the way more than they helped. It's a tool, and the research is the part that matters.