Working with AI for coding in Feb 2026

For the past few months I’ve been leaning into and learning how to use AI for writing code. Claude Code specifically.

A few things come to mind, but one of the best tips is to ‘Ask the AI how to work with it’. Plenty of people have said this and it’s not novel, but the simplicity is key.

Tips

1. You can customise Claude Code’s statusline . Try prompting: Tell me what we can configure for the status-line

2. If you start a prompt with ! it’ll run that as a bash command immediately (no thinking, but it does apparently still use tokens - albeit more token efficient)

3. Where you find yourself repeating yourself, you might want to consider ‘slash commands’ like I have done here (for reference): github.com/wesort/helpers-claude. Claude has a variety of these built in (just type / and you can use your up-down arrows to nav through them) but you can [have Claude] make your own.

4. Use ‘plan mode’ by toggling in Claude with shift+tab . Claude will do this automatically at times, but it forces it to generate a plan that you can review, re-prompt to adjust and then ‘implement’.

People who teach this well and in my view are good on this stuff:

• Aaron Francis

• Matt Pocock