Blog, page 3

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    A Claude desktop setup guide for corporate networks

    Installing Claude on a personal machine takes a minute. On a corporate machine the install works and then nothing connects. This setup guide covers the clean install on macOS and Windows, then the network layer, proxy, TLS inspection, and the outbound allowlist, where the afternoon actually goes.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    A complete guide to working with Claude

    Working with Claude now means a dozen things: Claude Code, the Desktop app, agents, the partner network, certifications, connectors. This is the map. A hub that lays out the five regions of working with Claude and links each one to a deeper guide.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Anthropic managed agents are not office agents

    Anthropic managed agents and office agents are different products with confusingly similar names. Managed agents is a developer API for running autonomous Claude agents on managed infrastructure. The interesting part is the brain-hands split: Anthropic runs the agent loop, while the sandbox can run in your own environment. This is what it is, and when to use it.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Ask Your Org, and the case for scoping Claude yourself

    Claude Ask Your Org connects Claude to Slack, Microsoft 365, and Drive in one project. Its security model is sound, permission-aware and not indexed. The question it makes easy to skip is scope. Here is when to use the broad tool and when to scope Claude yourself with a filesystem MCP server.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Claude certification vs the cloud AI certifications

    Should you get a Claude certification or an AWS certification? They certify different things. The Claude Certified Architect is product-specific, agent-native, and brand new. The AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud AI certifications are broad, years old, and openly bookable by anyone. Here is how to choose.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Claude Code effort mode and where it falls short

    Claude Code effort mode looks like a cost dial: turn it down to spend fewer tokens. The official docs say otherwise. Effort is a behavioral signal, not a strict budget, so low effort does not reliably cut spend and can quietly raise it. Here are the five levels, where they stop, and how to set effort with intent.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Claude Code enterprise security is a design problem

    Most guides to running Claude Code in an enterprise stop at the install. That is the easy ten percent. The real work is the security design around an agentic tool that runs commands and reads files: the audit trail, prompt injection, permission modes, and a managed policy file.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Claude Projects vs a git fileshare for teams

    Claude Projects works well for one person. For a team, it is missing the thing collaboration is built on: version control. No diff, no history, no rollback. Here is the case for a git-backed fileshare driven by Claude Code instead, and the line where each one wins.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Claude, NetSuite, and the SuiteScript governance trap

    Claude writes good SuiteScript, fast. But NetSuite meters every script with a governance unit budget, and AI-generated code does not see a limit that is not in the code. Here is what Claude does well in SuiteScript, the governance trap it walks into, and a safe workflow.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Design patterns for healthcare AI on Claude

    A signed BAA makes a Claude healthcare workflow legal, not safe. The engineering work is keeping protected health information away from the model. Three design patterns do most of that: de-identify before the model, keep PHI local, and log what the model saw.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How Claude Code scheduled jobs actually work

    Claude Code scheduled jobs come in three forms with very different guarantees: the in-session /loop, Desktop tasks, and Cloud routines. A missed run does not queue up a backlog. And despite a common belief, none of them creates a Windows Task Scheduler entry or a .bat file. Here is how each one actually behaves.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How Claude Code stop hooks work

    A Claude Code stop hook runs the moment Claude finishes a turn and can refuse to let it stop. It is the one hook that inverts control: Claude must pass your check before the turn ends. This post covers what a stop hook is, why exit code 2 is the whole game, the infinite-loop trap to avoid, and the patterns worth wiring up.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How the general-purpose agent works in Claude Code

    The general-purpose agent in Claude Code is not the main agent and not something you pick. It is a built-in subagent Claude routes to on its own for complex, multi-step work. It inherits your model and, by default, runs in its own fresh context that Claude briefs with a short summary. This post explains how it actually works and what that costs you.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How to budget tokens in Claude Code

    A surprising Claude Code bill is almost never one big expense. It is four different cost shapes stacked up: a context window that bills every turn, subagents that each cost a fixed chunk, skills that cost almost nothing until used, and caching that can cut the recurring cost or not. Budgeting tokens means knowing the four shapes.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How to debug Claude Code subagents

    When a Claude Code subagent fails, you cannot open it and look inside. It ran in its own isolated context and handed back a summary. Debugging a subagent is the skill of reading that summary, recognizing context-isolation failures, and designing subagents that report enough to be diagnosed. Here is how to do it.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How to hire an applied AI engineer

    A standard software interview will not tell you whether someone can hire as an applied AI engineer. The role-defining trait, making an unreliable model dependable, needs a different loop: a real take-home, a rubric that scores failure-mode thinking, and flags you can read in the room.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Is the Anthropic Certified Architect worth it

    The Anthropic Certified Architect, Foundations is the first official Claude technical certification. It is also brand new and now a paid exam at $125, which makes it hard to value. The free Anthropic Academy courses are the part worth doing today. The credential is a bet on a job market that does not exist yet.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Self-hosted vs managed AI agents is a governance call

    The choice between self-hosted and managed AI agents gets treated as build versus buy, a cost question. It is not. It is a governance decision about where your data goes, what you can audit, and whether you can leave. Here is what each path gives you and how to decide.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    The applied AI engineer is a reliability engineer

    What is an applied AI engineer? Someone who builds reliable production systems on foundation models they did not train. The role is defined less by a skill list than by one trait: failure-mode thinking. Here is what the job is, how it differs from ML engineering, and what makes a good one.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    The BAA for Claude Code is narrower than it looks

    Is there a BAA for Claude Code? Yes, but the coverage is narrow. A BAA can cover the Claude Code CLI, but only with Zero Data Retention enabled, and the self-serve Enterprise HIPAA toggle does not include it. What is covered, what is not, and why.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    The built-in agent types in Claude Code

    Claude Code ships with five built-in agent types: Explore, Plan, general-purpose, statusline-setup, and claude-code-guide. Most people know two of them. The other three run constantly and shape how much your sessions cost. This is the full catalog, what each one is for, and why knowing them changes how you read your own terminal.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    The real cost of a large context window in Claude Code

    A large context window in Claude Code feels free, and it is the opposite. Every token you load is re-billed on every turn after. The prompt cache that should make that cheap expires in five minutes, turning a tenth-price read into a higher-price write. And accuracy fades as the window fills. Here is the real cost.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    What is a subagent in Claude Code

    A subagent in Claude Code is a specialized worker that runs in its own fresh, isolated context window, with its own tools and permissions, and reports back only a summary. It is how Claude does a noisy side task without flooding your main conversation. Here is what a subagent is, what file defines it, and when it earns its cost.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    What the Anthropic partner program actually is

    The Anthropic partner program, the Claude Partner Network, launched in 2026. The surprise is how open it is: membership is free and any organization bringing Claude to market can join. That means joining is not the achievement. It is a box of enablement tools, and it gives you a multiplier, not leads. Here is what it actually is.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How to make AI emails actually sound like you

    Making AI emails sound like you is not a prompting trick. A tone guide produces press-release sludge. The fix is a voice corpus built from your own sent folder, a style file you version like code, and a draft-only rule. Harper Reed trained Claude on roughly 200 sent emails and the gap closed.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Stop telling Claude it is an expert: describe the work, not the worker

    You are an expert X was a useful crutch when GPT-3.5 was state of the art. On Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5, which have since shipped, persona prompting actively caps the ceiling. It tells the model to stay in a lane just as models are finally getting good at leaving the lane. Describe the work instead.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    Subagent vs parallel agent vs skill in Claude Code

    Subagent, parallel agent and skill get used as if they mean the same thing in Claude Code. They do not. A skill is reusable instructions that cost almost nothing until invoked. A subagent is delegated work in a fresh isolated context. Parallel agent is not a primitive at all. Picking the wrong one wastes tokens or floods your context.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    The forgetting curve is the math behind your make-or-buy decision for knowledge work

    Humans forget 58% of new information in 20 minutes, 75% in a day, 90% in a week. Ebbinghaus measured this in 1885 and Murre replicated it cleanly in 2015. The forgetting curve is the cognitive-science substrate that decides which retention-critical knowledge work AI can structurally replace at a mid-size company.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How to make a single root CLAUDE.md load across your whole organization

    Drop a CLAUDE.md at the root of a SharePoint site and nothing propagates. Each Claude product reads CLAUDE.md a different way. Four parallel loaders, all pulling from one canonical file, are what makes a single source of truth actually land in every session across Claude Code, Desktop, web, and Cowork.

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  • · Amit Kothari · AI

    How to export your Claude Projects data - three workarounds that actually work

    No export-Project-as-package button exists in Claude.ai. Anthropic ships a GDPR-compliance ZIP of conversations as JSON, no API endpoint for Projects, and a closed-as-not-planned GitHub issue for file downloads. Three workarounds work today. One is a local-disk cousin nobody mentions.

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