Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Three layers, one toolkit Most teams pick up Claude Code, write a CLAUDE.md, and stop there. That is a fine start, but it leaves three more powerful layers of automation untouched. This guide is about authoring those layers and stitching them together into a reusable, shareable kit. We deliberately do not cover building agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, or the planning stage — we have separate guides for those, cross-linked below. Here the subject is narrower and practical: the building blocks you author and package. Custom slash commands — Markdown files you and Claude can invoke with /name. Reusable prompts with frontmatter, arguments, embedded shell, and file references. Hooks — deterministic handlers the harness runs on lifecycle events. The layer that guarantees things…
