Claude Code
26 articles
A Starter Kit for the Economist’s First Week in Claude Code
A small set of copyable files that gives our second Claude Code session everything the first one forgot: seven files, installed in about ten minutes.
Running Claude Code skills, for applied economists
A setup guide for the TETS Claude Code skills introduced in the tool series (papers-md-generator, replication-package-analytics, attribution-audit-network).
Claude Code Skills Get Stale. Audit Them Quarterly.
Skills, memory entries, and hooks decay as models improve. In research, the decay can reach published findings and policy. A quarterly audit protocol.
What AI Impact Looks Like in the Slow Data
Usage telemetry sees AI adoption; slow public data sees household conditions. The same AI tooling can read both at the cadence either one needs.
A Pre-Analysis Plan for Your Coding Agent
A three-layer architecture, rule, gate, and verification, for keeping an AI coding agent disciplined, and why trained priors beat a system prompt.
Building a Literature Surveillance System
Building a literature-surveillance workflow on Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar alerts, with an AI assistant adding the glue and a verification layer.
Connecting Claude to FRED, Census, and More
How to connect Claude Code to external data sources like FRED, Census, and Google Scholar, bringing integrated research workflows into natural conversation.
Hooks: Automation Without Asking
Hooks are automatic triggers that run without asking - like auto-save, but for research tasks. A power-user feature, entirely optional.
Reading Our Analysis Files: How Claude Sees Our Research Code
How Claude Code explores research projects using three core tools: Read (look at a file), Glob (find files by pattern), and Grep (search inside files).
Why It Forgot Everything: Understanding Context
Understanding how AI context windows work, why sessions reset, and how to work with this fundamental limitation of large language models.
What Claude Code /insights Reveals at Every Stage
How to read a Claude Code /insights report at beginner and intermediate levels: the same usage data yields different lessons at each stage.
Your First Session: What Claude Code Is and Isn't
A practical walkthrough of what Claude Code can and cannot do, with prompting patterns and a complete first-task example.
Monitoring Government Data Portals
A case study in tracking California health data releases with Claude Code.
Staging LinkedIn Posts with Browser Automation
A case study in form-filling workflows that keep humans in the loop. Browser automation handles navigation and data entry while the human retains final…
Context Window Budgeting: Treating Tokens as a Finite Resource
Treating an AI context window as a finite budget: when to spawn sub-agents, when to work directly, and how to keep a long session from degrading.
End-of-Session Hygiene: What to Capture Before Context Resets
What to capture before an AI context window resets, and how five minutes of end-of-session notes saves twenty minutes rebuilding context tomorrow.
Creating Skills for Research
Skills are recipe cards for research tasks. Write the steps once, save them in a file, and Claude Code follows those instructions whenever needed.
Building Our Research System: Putting It All Together
How CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, and MCP servers combine into a personal research system that becomes more valuable over time. Part 5 of the Advanced Tier series.
Creating Helpers: When to Delegate Work
When to create separate Claude Code helpers for focused work, how to design tasks that are easy to hand off, and patterns for running multiple helpers at the…
The Cold Start Problem: Why the First Five Minutes Matter Most
Why the first five minutes of an AI coding session matter most, and how a CLAUDE.md context file solves the cold-start problem before work begins.
47 Scripts to 15: Cleaning a Research Codebase
Research projects accumulate code debt. An AI agent can map dependencies, identify dead code, and reorganize months of accumulated scripts, with…
Robust API Collection: Pagination, Limits, Retries
Collecting location data from Google Places API at scale requires handling rate limits, pagination, and failure recovery.
400 Labels to 94% Accuracy: Validating Grocery Store Data
Google Places returned thousands of 'grocery stores.' Many weren't. Here's how a classifier separates real grocery stores from gas stations and liquor stores.
From 7 Copy-Paste Cycles to 1 Command with AI Agents
The difference between chatbot-based coding and agent-based coding is categorical, not incremental. Here's what changes when AI can read your entire codebase.
From Methods Paragraph to Working Pipeline with AI
A well-written methodology section is almost executable code, and AI assistants have narrowed the gap between describing a procedure and implementing it.
One Context File: Teaching AI Your Research Project
Every new coding session with AI starts the same way: re-explaining the project. A single CLAUDE.md file loads automatically every session.