Advanced Claude Code techniques: context loading, mermaid diagrams, stop hooks, and more | John Lindquist

There are people out there definitely like me that really want to know the advanced techniques that can leverage the most powerful parts of these AI powered coding tools. Where do you want us to get started that you think many people don't think about in terms of how they can use these tools? Context and diagrams is a great place to start. They're definitely the best way to get AI to do what you want. So they have what are called mermaid diagrams. This is a way of visualizing database operations, and it's a way of essentially compressing your application down into very small lines of text that show how your application works. Now for a human to read this, this is a big challenge, but an AI can consume this easily. I could even just say, please explain the authentication flow. And because it already has it in the context, it's not gonna have to do a bunch of file reads and code based exploration to figure this out. It's gonna come up with results much quicker. If I gave you infinite junior to mid career talent who is always available, who would do the work you would do if you had unlimited amount of time and no meetings, what would you do when a ticket came in? Like, what would you do? Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vow, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have John Lindquist at ached.io who is a superuser of AI powered engineering tools like Cursor and Claude Code. Now I love all you nontechnical folks out there, but this is an episode for the senior software engineers who really want to understand how they can use the power features of some of these AI engineering tools to really both optimize the quality of code that they're generating, but also become more efficient as they use their IDE terminal and AI assistants to write, check, and deploy code. This is a great episode for any of our advanced users out there, VPs of engineering, CTO. Pay attention. Send this to your staff engineers. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where Work OS comes in. Work OS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features so your app …