Claude-Code

There’s a habit I can’t turn off. Whenever I’m working on something — whether it’s organizing a project, structuring a team, or just figuring out how to approach a problem — my brain immediately goes to: what’s the optimal shape for this? What information needs to flow, and between whom? Where are the boundaries?

It’s the kind of thinking that Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais gave a name and a framework to with Team Topologies. If you haven’t read it, the short version is that it offers a set of mental models for how engineering teams should be structured — and not around org charts, but around the flow of value. How teams communicate, where cognitive load sits, what interaction modes make sense for a given type of work. It fundamentally changed how I think about engineering organizations, and honestly, it’s one of those frameworks that keeps paying dividends years after you first encounter it.

Introduction

Building a platform like Swoop means juggling a mobile app, dashboards, APIs, infrastructure, and — more recently — AI agents. Over time, I built a workflow using Claude Code that treats all of it as one intelligent workspace: a single place where code, data, operations, and testing are deeply connected.

The key insight: AI becomes genuinely useful when it shares your mental model of the system.

When architecture, tooling, and context are explicit, Claude stops acting like autocomplete and starts reasoning like a teammate who understands your entire environment. This isn’t about clever prompts — it’s about teaching your workspace to think in context.

AI is one of the most polarizing topics in engineering right now. For some, it represents a threat to jobs or a black box risk; for others, it’s the next great productivity revolution. But beneath the noise, there’s a more subtle — and in many ways more exciting — shift underway: the evolution of AI tools like Cursor and Claude into customizable workflow partners.

Instead of being just autocomplete engines, these tools are learning how to meet us exactly where we are. Through hooks, sub-agents, and local context, they’re becoming bridges across the many layers and abstractions engineers have to navigate daily.