Hey there, fellow devs! Let's be honest, we all have those little repetitive tasks that eat away at our precious coding time. Whether it's setting up a new component, running a complex series of tests, or just formatting a file just right, these things can break our flow & drive us a little crazy. But what if I told you that you could automate a ton of that, & even build your own personalized set of super-powered tools, right in your terminal?

Turns out, you absolutely can. The rise of AI coding assistants, especially powerful ones like Anthropic's Claude, has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. We're not just talking about autocompleting a line of code anymore. We're talking about creating truly agentic workflows, where the AI can understand your project, use your tools, & carry out complex tasks on your behalf.

In this deep dive, we're going to explore how to build your own custom CLI tools & create reusable prompts, specifically with Claude Code in mind. We'll start with the built-in features of the Claude Code CLI & then get our hands dirty with some Python to build a standalone tool that you can tailor to your exact needs. So grab your favorite beverage, fire up your terminal, & let's get started.

First things first, if you haven't already, you need to get the Claude Code CLI set up. It's distributed via npm, so a simple should do the trick. Once that's installed, you'll have the command available globally in your terminal. Pretty cool, right?

Now, the real magic of the Claude Code CLI lies in its customizability. One of the most powerful features is the ability to create your own slash commands. These are essentially shortcuts for longer, more complex prompts that you find yourself using over & over again.

Here's how it works: you create a directory in your project's root folder. Inside that directory, you can create markdown files, & the name of the file becomes the name of your command.

For example, let's say you have a specific way you like to write tests for your React components. You could create a file called in your directory with the following content: