The Complete Claude Code Compendium

An operator's manual for Claude Code and for running a multi-surface software estate with AI coding agents. Verified against build 2.1.211. By Jason Colapietro.

Part I. The Ground

  1. Chapter 1. What Claude Code Is, and the Four Places It Runs
  2. Chapter 2. Installing Claude Code and Configuring It for Real Work
  3. Chapter 3. Claude Code Models, Reasoning Effort, and the Context Window
  4. Chapter 4. Claude Code Sessions: Context, Compaction, and What a Run Costs

Part II. Instruction

  1. Chapter 5. CLAUDE.md and the Claude Code Memory Hierarchy
  2. Chapter 6. Durable Claude Code Memory: What to Write Down and What to Refuse
  3. Chapter 7. Claude Code Slash Commands
  4. Chapter 8. Claude Code Agent Skills: The Format, the Loading Model, the Mechanics
  5. Chapter 9. Building a Claude Code Skill Pack That Compounds
  6. Chapter 10. Claude Code Subagents
  7. Chapter 11. Claude Code Agent Teams, Fleets, and Parallel Work

Part III. Wiring

  1. Chapter 12. Claude Code MCP: What the Protocol Does
  2. Chapter 13. Claude Code MCP in Practice: Scopes, Auth, Limits, and Failure Modes
  3. Chapter 14. Claude Code Hooks: Every Event and the Contract Each One Has
  4. Chapter 15. Claude Code Hooks in Practice: Guardrails That Hold
  5. Chapter 16. Claude Code Plugins and Marketplaces

Part IV. Control

  1. Chapter 17. Claude Code Permissions and the Autonomy Contract
  2. Chapter 18. Claude Code Sandboxing and Blast Radius
  3. Chapter 19. Claude Code Checkpoints, Rewind, and What They Do Not Restore
  4. Chapter 20. Claude Code Headless Mode, CI, and Scheduled Runs

Part V. Ground Truth

  1. Chapter 21. This Machine Is a Stale Mirror
  2. Chapter 22. Many Agents, One Machine
  3. Chapter 23. Where Memory Lives When the Session Ends

Part VI. The Incident Log

  1. Chapter 24. 2026-05-11: The Name on the Work
  2. Chapter 25. 2026-07-16: The Silent Fallback That Took Production Down
  3. Chapter 26. 2026-07-16: The Bill Nobody Was Reading
  4. Chapter 27. 2026-07-17: The Origin That Was Never Allowlisted
  5. Chapter 28. 2026-07-17 to 07-18: The Twelve-Hour Estate-Wide Pass
  6. Chapter 29. 2026-07-22: The Headline That Wrapped at Every Width
  7. Chapter 30. 2026-07-25: The Worktree That Was Still Running
  8. Chapter 31. 2026-07-26: The Test File That Answered the Internet

Part VII. The Disciplines

  1. Chapter 32. The Verification Law
  2. Chapter 33. Deploy Discipline: Pins, Promotions, and Silent No-ops
  3. Chapter 34. Spend Discipline for a One-Person Estate

Part VIII. Cadence

  1. Chapter 35. Clocking In and Clocking Out Across Machines
  2. Chapter 36. How to Run an Estate-Wide Pass
  3. Chapter 37. What Done Means, and Who Decides