been deep in Claude Code optimization the last couple weeks and figured i'd share what actually moved the needle, since i see this asked a lot.
two free things did most of the work:
1. a permanent knowledge base Claude reads before every task (Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea) so it stops forgetting context
2. the Superpowers plugin so it plans before it codes instead of guessing
context + process. that combo is the real unlock.