The Temptation to Over-Engineer

Claude Code supports slash commands, skills, MCP servers, and custom tooling. When you find yourself doing something repeatedly, the natural instinct kicks in: build a reusable command.

You should absolutely resist this urge.

Because you start imagining slash commands like this:

/create-blog-post --image=path/to/image.png --repo=github.com/user/blog --title="My Post" --tags="AI,CLI"

And before you know it, you're building and maintaining a tool instead of shipping work.

Keep it simple stupid

Skip creating more tools: modern agents like Claude Code and Codex are extremely good at using CLI tools. So "just talk to it" and describe in detail what you want. Citing the appropriate tools (like gh).

Again, Claude Code and company already knows how to use gh, git, npm, docker, and dozens of other CLI tools. You don't need to wrap them in custom commands. Just describe what you want and point it at the resources.

Real Example: Writing This Post

This blog post was created without a single custom Claude Code Slash Command / Skill / whatever. Just an idea, some notes, and a discussion with Claude Code created the content, the PR, workflow debugging, etc.,

Here's how I kicked off the conversation with Claude Code about this article (we had several back and forths to refine):

"Help me create a succinct article for my blog (located at neonwatty.com) whose github repo is located at xxx. The subject: stop over-complicating Claude Code with over-engineered Slash Commands / Skills / sub-Agents / etc., Claude Code, Codex, etc., are extremely solid with CLI tools - they're all you need. Don't waste time building / maintaining agentic tooling when you can just "talk to it", describe what you want done (citing appropriate CLI tools / things you need done), and just ship."

That's it. One natural language prompt to kick things off containing:

The blog URL and repo location
The topic and angle
Where to find any images

Claude Code - with its access to tools like gh - can figure out the boring stuff on its own:

Cloned the blog repo and explored its structure
Found and uploaded images to the readme_gifs repo via git (where I store images for various projects)
Used my autocomplete google for SEO keyword research
Wrote the markdown following existing post conventions
Created a PR with gh pr create