Workflow on Chen Kai Blog

Claude Code Hands-On (7): Ten Hooks I Actually Use, with the Code

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Chapter 5 provided a conceptual tour of hooks. This chapter is the field guide. From the 100-script reference repo, ten scripts earn their place in every serious project I run. I’ll walk through these ten with code.

All examples assume Node 18+, save scripts to ./hooks/, mark them chmod +x, and wire them in .claude/settings.json like:

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{
 "hooks": {
 "PreToolUse": [
 { "matcher": "Read|Grep", "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "node ./hooks/block-env-read.js" }] }
 ]
 }
}

Before we dive in, here’s the hook lifecycle to make the following code clear:

Claude Code Hands-On (3): Custom Slash Commands and Conversation Control

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Built-in slash commands like /clear and /init are the visible part of the iceberg. The main point of the system is for you to write your own commands, which live in your repo.

What a slash command is#

A file at .claude/commands/<name>.md. Contents are a Markdown prompt. Filename becomes the command. After creating the command, you need to restart Claude Code (one of the few places it isn’t hot-reloaded).

LLM Workflows and Application Architecture: Enterprise Implementation Guide

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Most LLM tutorials end where the interesting work begins. They show you how to call a chat completion endpoint, attach a vector store, and wrap the whole thing in a Streamlit demo. None of that is wrong, but none of it is what breaks at 3 a.m. when 10,000 users hit your service at once and every other answer is a hallucination.

This article is about everything that comes after the demo. It is opinionated on purpose: production LLM systems are mostly plain distributed systems with one non-deterministic component bolted on, and most of the engineering effort goes into containing that non-determinism. We will work through seven dimensions — application architecture, workflow patterns, the RAG-vs-fine-tune decision, deployment topology, cost, observability, and enterprise integration — keeping each one short, concrete, and grounded in the levers that actually move the needle.