claude --bg --name "weekly-audit" --model claude-opus-4-7 --effort high --permission-mode auto "Read all changes merged this week. Cross-reference against .claude/rules/trust-boundary.md. Write WEEKLY_AUDIT.md with findings ranked by severity. Flag any payment or auth path changes explicitly."
2. The Completion Gate
Before any PR goes out, I set a /goal with the exact criteria from our definition of done. Not a checklist I run through manually. Not a reminder to check TypeScript. A condition Claude satisfies or keeps working:
/goal All TypeScript type errors resolved. All unit tests pass. No console.log statements remaining. ESLint reports zero errors on changed files.
Claude works through the list systematically. It does not stop until every condition is true. This replaced my pre-PR checklist habit, which I was reliably skipping under deadline pressure.
3. The Pinned Session
I keep one pinned session open in Agent View for the project I am actively shipping. It holds project context, MCP server connections, and permission settings — configured once, preserved across updates. When I need Claude for something quick, I jump into the pinned session instead of starting a cold context window. Auto-restart on updates means I get new Claude Code features without losing the session configuration.
The /usage Command: Real Cost Visibility
Starting in v2.1.149, /usage breaks down your token costs by category: skills, subagents, plugins, and MCP server calls. Before this update, the aggregate cost was visible but opaque — you could not tell whether a session's cost was driven by MCP tool calls, recursive subagent spawning, or the main conversation. That distinction matters when you are optimizing a multi-agent workflow for cost efficiency.
For MCP-heavy workflows, the MCP servers guide covers patterns for keeping call counts reasonable. An agent that calls an MCP server 50 times in a session is often doing something that could be batched into 3–5 calls with better tool design. /usage makes that pattern visible instead of hiding it inside an aggregate number.
What to Do Right Now
Update to v2.1.149 or later: npm update -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code. Then run claude agents and look at what is actually running. Most developers are surprised to find sessions they backgrounded and forgot. Pin the ones that matter with Ctrl+T so they survive the next update cycle.
For any task that takes more than 20 minutes to specify, set a /goal with the completion criteria instead of a task description. The difference in outcome is consistent enough that I now default to /goal for anything beyond a single-file edit.
If you are building production workflows with background agents, read the new flag documentation before committing to an architecture. The --permission-mode, --fallback-model, and --add-dir flags together create a configuration surface that was not possible before May 2026. The agents you can build now are meaningfully more reliable than what shipped in April.
The CLAUDE.md templates, agent skill starters, and MCP server boilerplates for building these workflows are available at wowhow.cloud — pay once, configure once, ship reliably.
Originally published at wowhow.cloud