Claude Code Mastery: The 7 Levels From Beginner Prompts to Fully Autonomous Pipelines

Introduction

Most people who use Claude Code are stuck at level two or three without knowing it. They type requests, accept edits, and move on — and they get value from that. But they are leaving an enormous amount of leverage on the table.

Since launching in February 2025 and reaching general availability in May of that year, Claude Code has grown into a tool that hit $1 billion in annualized revenue by November 2025. At its upper levels, it becomes an autonomous system that plans, executes, connects to your apps, coordinates teams of specialized sub-agents, and runs overnight pipelines that deliver finished work by morning. The gap between how most developers use it and what it is actually capable of is significant.

This article maps all seven levels — from the first habit that separates beginners from power users, to the frameworks and architectures that let you step back and supervise rather than execute.

Level 1 — Prompt With Intent: Plan Before You Build

The single habit that separates a beginner from someone who gets real results is planning before executing.

Claude Code ships with a built-in Plan Mode — a read-only mode where Claude cannot modify any files or run any commands. Instead it reads your codebase, asks clarifying questions, and proposes a complete plan before a single line changes. You can activate it by pressing Shift+Tab twice to cycle through Normal, Auto-Accept, and Plan Mode, or by typing /plan directly in the prompt.

Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic, is explicit about this in his own workflow: he does not take any execution actions until he has gone back and forth with Claude in plan mode and is satisfied with the plan. Only then does he switch to auto-accept edits mode — and at that point, Claude can usually one-shot the execution.

Why does this matter so much? In Plan Mode, all write and edit tools are disabled. Claude can only read, search, and reason. This forces it to think through the problem fully — asking targeted questions that surface your assumptions and fill in the gaps in your brief. By the time you switch to execution, Claude has a comprehensive set of context to work from, and there is far less back-and-forth to correct course.

The practical rule: never give Claude an execution task without first running it through plan mode. Vague prompts in execution mode produce generic, off-target output. The same prompt in plan mode produces a structured, assumption-tested plan that executes cleanly.

Level 2 — The CLAUDE.md File: Giving Claude Your Rules

Claude follows instructions. The question is whether those instructions come from you, or from Claude’s own defaults.

The CLAUDE.md file solves this. It is a project-level document that Claude reads at the start of every session — your rules, your stack, your preferences, and the mistakes you do not want repeated. Think of it as onboarding documentation for a new team member who happens to have a perfect memory. Claude actually assembles a memory hierarchy from most general to most specific: ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for global preferences, the project root CLAUDE.md for team conventions, and subdirectory CLAUDE.md files for module-specific instructions.

Boris Cherny’s team keeps a single CLAUDE.md file, version-controlled in Git, with the entire team contributing to it. When Claude makes a recurring mistake, they add a rule. When a rule becomes outdated, they remove it. The file evolves with the project.

A practical framework for writing yours:

1. What is this? One line. “This project generates daily social media content across LinkedIn, X, and Instagram in my brand voice, pulling topics from a content calendar in Airtable.”
2. How do you run things? The exact steps — where the data lives, where outputs go, folder conventions.
3. Voice and rules. Your non-negotiables. Format requirements. Words you never use.
4. Common mistakes. Edge cases that trip Claude up — naming conflicts, ambiguous field names, counterintuitive behavior in your stack.
5. How do we work? File naming conventions, what never to do automatically, how to handle repurposed content.

The golden rule: keep it concise. The official documentation advises “less is more” — include as few instructions as reasonably necessary and use progressive disclosure, referencing external files for detail rather than dumping everything inline. A CLAUDE.md that takes more than 60 seconds to read is too long.

If you are starting inside an existing project, run /init — Claude will scan your repository and generate a starter file you can trim and refine.

Level 3 — Slash Commands, Skills, and Hooks

Once Claude knows your rules, the next unlock is eliminating repetitive prompting. Level 3 introduces three mechanisms that automate how you interact with Claude.

Slash Commands — Saved Prompts You Trigger Manually

Slash commands are reusable prompts stored as Markdown files in .claude/commands/. You invoke them with a / prefix and can pass dynamic arguments using the $ARGUMENTS placeholder.

Example: a file at .claude/commands/linkedin-post.md with the content “Write three LinkedIn post variations about $ARGUMENTS. Pull brand voice from /docs/brandvoice.md. Start with a hook, then a line break, then the body. End each post with a question or CTA. Under 200 words. No hashtags. Save drafts to /output/drafts.” — and you invoke it as /linkedin-post <topic>.

Any task you run more than twice a week is a candidate for a slash command. Commands in .claude/commands/ are project-scoped, while ~/.claude/commands/ makes them available across all projects.

Skills — Context That Loads Automatically

Skills are an upgraded version of commands. They are folders stored in .claude/skills/, each containing a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and markdown instructions, plus supporting files — style guides, example outputs, reference documents. Unlike commands, skills are not only manually triggered: Claude reads the skill’s metadata at startup and loads the full skill automatically when it is relevant to the task.

A humanizer skill that removes AI-generated writing patterns, for example, will activate whenever Claude is producing content — without you remembering to invoke it. You can still call it explicitly with a slash prefix if needed.

The community marketplace SkillsMP offers a growing library of ready-made skills across categories including content, frontend design, SEO, and email — all using the open SKILL.md standard. You can clone any skill directly into your project’s skills folder and modify it to fit your requirements.

Hooks — Mechanical Checks That Cost Zero Tokens

Hooks are automatic triggers that fire at specific lifecycle points — before a tool runs, after a tool completes, when Claude sends a notification, or when the session starts. No LLM reasoning is involved. They are defined in .claude/settings.json (or .claude/settings.local.json for personal overrides) and execute shell scripts or checks programmatically.

Use hooks for things that do not require thinking: ban-word checks, word count validation, auto-formatting, file naming enforcement. These checks will always run, they will not consume tokens, and they cannot be skipped by Claude’s reasoning.

The memory aid: Skills = how Claude thinks. Hooks = what happens automatically around Claude’s actions. Commands = what you manually trigger.

Level 4 — MCP Servers: Connect Claude to Everything

Up to this point, Claude works on files in your local environment. Level 4 breaks that boundary.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are bridges between Claude Code and external applications — Airtable, Notion, Slack, GitHub, databases, APIs. Instead of copying data out of your tools and pasting it into Claude, you connect the tools directly. Claude reads from them, acts on them, and writes results back.

Setup is straightforward: use the claude mcp add CLI command to register a server — for example, claude mcp add github -- npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-github. This writes the configuration to your .claude.json file. You can also edit that file directly when complex parameters are involved. Once configured, use the /mcp slash command inside Claude Code to view and manage all connected servers.

A practical example: a content pipeline stored in Airtable. Without MCP, you copy the content brief, paste it into Claude, get a result, copy that back, and paste it into Airtable. With MCP, you tell Claude “pull all ideas added after January 20th, run them through /linkedin-post, and update the system message column in Airtable with the best variation.” Claude reads the records, generates the posts, and writes the output directly into your table — all in one command.

Thousands of MCP server configurations are available through community repositories, covering the most common SaaS tools. MCP supports three transport modes — stdio, SSE, and Streamable HTTP — with stdio as the default.

Level 5 — The GSD Framework: Planning on Steroids

For large, loosely scoped projects, the single biggest problem with Claude Code is context rot.

As your conversation grows, the context window fills. When it reaches roughly 95% of its 200,000-token capacity, Claude automatically compresses older content into summaries. Research from Chroma shows that model performance degrades non-uniformly as input length increases, with the earliest information being lost first once the context window is more than half full. Long sessions produce progressively worse outputs, and the degradation varies by task complexity.

The GSD framework (Get Stuff Done) addresses this by keeping context in files rather than in the conversation window. It creates a .planning/ folder with:

• Roadmap (ROADMAP.md) — the full project broken into phases
• State file (STATE.md) — decisions, blockers, and position that persists across sessions
• Per-phase plan files — atomic task breakdowns with XML structure and verification steps
• Per-phase execution summaries — written after each phase completes, committed to history
• User Acceptance Testing (UAT) files — auto-generated checklists Claude uses to verify completion before moving on

The critical mechanism: GSD spawns fresh Claude instances for each task, each receiving a clean 200,000-token context window. Task 50 runs with the same quality as Task 1 — no degradation. The execution loop is: Discuss → Plan the phase → Execute (in parallel “waves” based on dependencies) → Verify against UAT → Mark complete → Start the next phase with fresh context.

GSD is the right tool when scope is uncertain and planning depth matters. If your task is “build a SaaS application with authentication, data management, an AI generation pipeline, and Stripe billing,” GSD provides the structure to execute that without context collapse.

Level 6 — Agent Teams: Parallel Sub-Agents

At level 5, you supervise one Claude. At level 6, you supervise a coordinated team.

Sub-agents are specialized Claude instances with isolated context. Each one is defined as a Markdown file in .claude/agents/ with a description, allowed tools, and a focused prompt. Claude auto-detects these files and invokes them based on task matching. They do not share context with each other — which is the point. Isolated context means faster responses, fewer tokens, and no cross-contamination between different types of work.

There are two distinct reasons to use agent teams:

1. Quality through specialization. A researcher sub-agent with web access gathers and synthesizes information. It hands off a research brief to the main Claude instance, which acts as writer. A reviewer sub-agent checks the output against brand voice guidelines and platform rules — but is only allowed to suggest edits, not make them. Each agent does what it is specialized for.

2. Speed through parallelism. Open multiple terminal windows, each running a separate Claude instance on independent tasks. One terminal drafts LinkedIn posts. Another drafts Instagram content. A third handles email sequences. They do not need to interact — you get three outputs in the time one would take.

Boris Cherny runs five Claude instances in parallel locally, each using its own git checkout to avoid conflicts, plus five to ten more on claude.ai simultaneously — all using Opus, Anthropic’s most capable model. That is the leverage ceiling: not one AI assistant, but a coordinated team working in parallel while you review outputs.

For high-trust environments where approval prompts slow everything down, --dangerously-skip-permissions removes all permission checks for the entire session. Anthropic explicitly warns that this should only be used inside isolated containers or VMs — never on your primary machine — due to the risk of unintended destructive actions.

Level 7 — Fully Autonomous Pipelines: The Ralph Loop

Level 7 is where you set it up, walk away, and come back to finished work.

The Ralph pattern encompasses two implementations that both solve the same problem: driving Claude through a task list autonomously until a completion condition is met.

The official Ralph Wiggum plugin, included in the Claude Code plugins repository, works within your current session. You run /ralph-loop "Your task description" --completion-promise "DONE" --max-iterations 20, and the plugin uses a Stop hook to block normal session exit, creating a self-referential feedback loop. Claude works on the task, tries to exit, gets fed the same prompt again, and repeats until the completion promise is met or the iteration limit is reached.

The community Ralph implementation takes a different approach: it runs as a bash script that spawns fresh Claude Code instances for each iteration. It uses a prd.json file as input — a structured list of user stories with descriptions, acceptance criteria, and pass/fail status. Each iteration selects the highest-priority incomplete story, implements it, runs quality checks, commits if checks pass, and updates prd.json. Memory persists through git history and a progress.txt file.

Both approaches share the same critical design choice: context refreshes between iterations. Each task starts with a clean context window, which directly prevents context rot. Always set a --max-iterations limit to prevent runaway token spend.

Ralph works best on well-scoped, repetitive tasks with unambiguous acceptance criteria. “Write six LinkedIn posts on these topics, each under 200 words, with no banned words” is a perfect Ralph task. The criteria are measurable, the output is deterministic, and there is nothing to figure out — only work to do.

GSD vs. Ralph:

• GSD is a planner and executor. Use it when scope is unclear and the project needs to be decomposed before work begins.
• Ralph is a pure executor. Use it when tasks are already fully defined and you just need them done — fast, without supervision.

The Full Progression at a Glance

Level	What You Unlock	Core Tool
1	Plan before executing	Plan Mode (Shift+Tab ×2 or /plan)
2	Claude follows your rules	CLAUDE.md
3	Eliminate repetitive prompting	Commands, Skills, Hooks
4	Connect to your actual apps	MCP Servers
5	Handle large projects without context collapse	GSD Framework
6	Parallel specialized agents	.claude/agents/
7	Fully autonomous overnight pipelines	Ralph Loop

Most developers using Claude Code today are operating at levels 1 or 2 — and that is already valuable. But the architecture described in levels 4 through 7 represents a fundamentally different relationship with AI tooling: one where you design systems and supervise outputs, rather than prompt and wait.

The transition from operator to architect is what distinguishes teams that get 2x productivity from those that get 10x.

Sources & Further Reading

• Claude Code Official Documentation — Anthropic
• Boris Cherny’s Claude Code Workflow — VentureBeat
• Inside the Development Workflow of Claude Code’s Creator — InfoQ
• Model Context Protocol: Introduction — MCP Official
• Context Rot Research — Chroma
• GSD Framework — GitHub
• Beating Context Rot with GSD — The New Stack
• Ralph Wiggum Plugin — Anthropic GitHub
• Ralph Autonomous Agent Loop — snarktank GitHub
• SkillsMP: Agent Skills Marketplace
• Claude Code GitHub Repository — Anthropic