Claude Desktop in 2026 — Projects, MCP, and Extended Thinking in Daily Use
Notes from using Claude Desktop daily as an indie developer — when Projects, MCP, extended thinking, and Computer Use actually pay off, and how the desktop app compares to the web version in 2026.
How to Automate Game Development with Claude Code × unity-mcp — A Complete Workflow from Concept to Release
Learn how to combine Claude Code with unity-mcp to automate Unity game development. The hcg-workflows skill set provides an 8-phase workflow from planning to deployment.
Canva × Claude in Practice — Saving Generated Candidates, Picking a design_type, Committing Edits
The parts of the Canva AI connector that actually trip people up in Claude: why generated designs are not saved yet, how to pick a design_type, why editing is a transaction, and what to check before exporting.
The MCP Server I Declared Vanished from the List — Designing Config for a Namespace You Share with the Vendor
When a vendor reserves an MCP server name, your .mcp.json declaration goes quiet instead of failing. Here is the preflight check and prefix convention I use to turn that silent gap into a loud stop before an unattended run.
It Worked on My Machine, but Nobody Could Trigger It — Four Assumptions I Stripped Out of a Cowork Plugin
I bundled four working automation skills into a plugin and shared it. Only one of them ever fired. Here is how I measured skill trigger rate, and the four assumptions — vocabulary, paths, connections, and naming — I had to strip out before it was portable.
The Morning My Table Ended in "… 2,847 more rows" — Separating Render Caps from Token Cost in Tool Output
Claude Code 2.1.209 caps markdown tables at 200 rows plus a remainder count. Only the rendering is capped — the model still receives every row. Here is how to measure the gap and redesign tool output around aggregates.
The Permission Rules You Added for Safety Are Taxing Every Turn — Auditing the Ruleset Without Loosening It
Version 2.1.209 fixed the per-turn slowdown from large deny/ask rulesets, but the design debt in your rules is still yours. Here are the audit scripts, a shadowing detector, a turn-timing harness, and how to fold enumerated rules into prefix rules safely.
Your Overnight Session Wakes Up at 3GB — Four Places Memory Piles Up, and How to Tell Them Apart
The Claude Code process I left running overnight had grown to 3.4GB of resident memory by morning. Here are the four accumulation sources closed in 2.1.209, how to separate what's left in your own setup by sampling RSS slope, and a watchdog pattern that folds a session before it hurts.
Answering auto mode's confirmation prompts in headless runs — a deny-by-default permission-prompt-tool
auto mode's confirmation step is a friend when you're at the keyboard, but in an unattended midnight run it becomes the reason a job sits waiting until morning. Here is how I catch those prompts with permission-prompt-tool, decide deny-by-default, and log every ruling — with working code.
My MCP Timeout Was Being Ignored, and Every Call Died at Exactly 60 Seconds — Reclaiming Per-Server request_timeout_ms
A longer MCP tool call kept dying at exactly 60 seconds, ignoring the wait I had set. The cause: a per-server request_timeout_ms in .mcp.json that was never read, silently falling back to the default. Here is the correct placement after the fix, how to back the value out from a tool's response profile, and how to verify the cutoff yourself — with working code.
The Night a Connector Grew Write Tools, Your Unattended Job Could Quietly Send Something
The moment a connector update quietly adds write tools, a job you run unattended can suddenly send email or delete files. Here is how to build a gate that snapshots a connector's tool surface, diffs it, and stops unapproved writes before they run — drawn from indie development.
Make Your Nightly MCP Connectors' Health Visible — A Lightweight Ledger for Solo Operators
You don't need Enterprise connector observability to see your MCP connectors' error rate and latency. Append one line per tool call, roll it up weekly, and let regressions ring a bell. A working health ledger for anyone running scheduled tasks solo.