Podcast Summary: Behind the Craft

Episode: How to Make Claude Code Better Every Time You Use It | Kieran Klaassen
Date: February 8, 2026
Host: Peter Yang
Guest: Kieran Klaassen, CTO at Quora (every), builder of the Compound Engineering method and plugin

Overview

This episode dives deep into how to make AI coding tools—specifically Claude Code—more effective every time you use them. Kieran Klaassen, CTO at Quora (every), shares his "Compound Engineering" philosophy and toolkit, revealing strategies and hands-on tactics for building compounding systems where your AI code agent learns, adapts, and gets better with every feedback loop. Kieran gives a live tour of his exact workflows, plugins, and principles that put an AI-powered, multi-agent developer environment within reach of all modern product builders.

Key Topics and Insights

The Philosophy of Compound Engineering

• AI's continual learning: Kieran emphasizes that AI can and should learn from every mistake and every bit of user feedback to improve continuously.
  • "If you invest time to have the AI learn what you like and learn what it does wrong, it won't do it the next time." (Kieran, 00:00)
• The Compound Loop: The process is a four-stage loop:
  1. Planning: Laying out a work plan.
  2. Working: Executing the plan.
  3. Assessing/Reviewing: Checking the work for correctness, coverage, and quality.
  4. Codifying Learnings: Capturing feedback as explicit, reusable knowledge—so next time, the AI doesn't repeat mistakes.
     • “Making sure those learnings are captured. And then the next time you create a plan, it's there, it learns. So that's really the philosophy of the loop.” (Kieran, 01:54)
• Compound Engineering is also available as an open-source plugin that anyone can install.

[01:54-03:33]

Practical Walkthrough: Setting Up and Using Compound Engineering with Claude Code

Environment and Initial Setup

• Terminal & Tools: Kieran uses Warp (an AI-based terminal) and runs Claude Code in dangerous skip permissions mode.
• Project Example: Making the Quora app "Agent Native"—letting the in-app AI do anything a user can.
  • “The idea of Agent Native is that the assistant…the agent within the app can do exactly the same thing as the user can.” (Kieran, 03:34)

Detailed Steps Within the Loop

1. Planning Phase

• Enhanced AI Planning:
  • Uses multiple sub-agents that analyze existing code, research best practices, and explore the frameworks and versions used.
  • Heavy use of context and tokens to ground the plan in real project data.
  • Sub-agents run in separate contexts for maximum specialization.
    • “It will use more tokens, but also it will do better research…it grounds itself in what you already did... it will pick up those patterns…” (Kieran, 07:34)
• Skills and Agent-Native Skills:
  • Define reusable “skills” and knowledge that the AI can pull in when relevant.
  • “A skill is this way, like it's kind of just-in-time context... You can create your own skills that you reference.” (Kieran, 12:54)

2. Deepening, Reviewing, and Refining Plans

• Iterative Refinement:
  • Kieran recommends reviewing draft plans, and encouraging the AI to generalize tooling or consolidate steps.
    • “Can we not somehow consolidate this?... Can we create one tool that can do multiple settings so it's less heavy?” (Kieran, 20:00)
  • If a new learning is discovered, use the compound flow to ensure next plans don’t repeat past mistakes.
    • “I'm going to run the compound flow and it will understand from the context here what it is about…so next time when it starts writing a plan, it will pull in that information…” (Kieran, 20:00)

3. Working / Execution

• Launching the Work: Paste the improved plan and let Claude code execute it.
• Context Management: Optionally start a new session for a clean context.

4. Assessment / QA Review Loop

• Testing with Playwright:

  • Automated end-to-end browser tests (including video/screenshot capture) using Playwright, orchestrated by Claude.
    • "You don't even need to write a test…it's a QA team, basically...And the beauty is it is in Claude code, so if something breaks, it can fix it immediately and immediately validate whether it fixed it." (Kieran, 33:10)
  • Real use-case: Even crazier integration flows, like live-testing Gmail integrations.
    • “With Playwright, I could just log in with my Gmail account and say, hey, I'm logged in…Just see if it works. And it went to Gmail. It's just a browser.” (Kieran, 34:05)

• Multiple Specialized Reviewers:

  • Custom AI reviewers: security, architecture, simplicity, “agent-nativeness,” and more.
  • Reviews synthesize findings into a to-do list sorted by severity (P1, P2, P3).

• Triage and Resolution:

  • Kieran uses an AI-powered triage command that walks him through findings and asks for human sign-off when ambiguity exists.

Key Features, Plugins, and Shortcuts

The Compound Engineering Plugin

• Open-source on GitHub: Includes commands for every phase—planning, working, reviewing, compounding, triage, and even video generation of new features.
  • Slash Commands: All flows are triggered via slash commands. The system can be used in full, or piecemeal (e.g., only the planning step).
    • “The beauty is you don't need to use this whole system. You can just say I use the plan phase and then I go manually code everything because I love to write code.” (Kieran, 39:29)

Permissions Workflow

• Dangerous Skip Permissions: Speeds experimentation by not requiring repetitive approval—just ensure sandboxing for safety.
  • “If you go in this mode, it will never ask you for anything. It will just keep going. That is good for certain flows...just make sure...your computer where you work is safe…” (Kieran, 42:12)

Parallelized Sub-Agents, Slash Commands, and Skills

• Slash Commands = business logic
  • “Slash commands are like, you trigger things… you want control over.” (Kieran, 47:02)
• Sub-agents = parallel or specialized tasks
  • “Sub agents are mostly, if you want to run something or do something specialized…if you want to do things in parallel, like, if you can do 10 things at the same time. Sub agents are the way to go.” (Kieran, 47:02)
• Skills = context-specific knowledge injection
  • “Suddenly Claude knows how to generate an image...just-in-time, like AI trick context.” (Kieran, 49:55)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “AI can learn, which is really cool…So that's the seed for compound engineering.” (Kieran, 00:00)
• “It's like a QA team, basically. You don't even need to write a test. You just say, yo, just test it.” (Kieran, 00:18, and again at 33:10)
• “Compound Engineering is… best practices that I learned from using AI.” (Kieran, 01:54)
• “I haven't opened Cursor other than looking at text files in like the last three months.” (Kieran, 12:34)
• “I'm just thinking, what do I do always manually. And that's getting less and less and less because it's just taking over more.” (Kieran, 53:09)
• “It took me a year. So yeah, it takes a long time. But I do realize some people want their own… The beauty is you don't need to use this whole system.” (Kieran, 39:29)
• “You vibe with it?” (Interviewer, 18:14, tone: playful banter)
• “No one knows [about the ampersand trick to push to cloud], but it's pretty cool.” (Kieran, 46:21)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00-01:54 — Kieran on AI learning and the compound loop
• 03:33-07:34 — Live walkthrough: Planning with compound plugin
• 07:34-12:54 — Agents, skills, and best practice research
• 12:54-15:15 — Creating and maintaining "skills" for agents
• 20:00-22:22 — Compounding learnings across projects
• 29:01-29:52 — "Managing an AI team"—new engineering paradigm
• 33:10-34:05 — Playwright as AI QA tester and video artifact creator
• 42:12-43:41 — Skip-permission mode and safety
• 47:02-50:09 — Slash commands, sub-agents, and skills explained
• 53:09-53:42 — “Manual work declining,” big picture impact

Final Takeaways

• Compound Engineering is a practical, extensible development technique for AI-powered codebases.
• Feedback, QA, and documentation loops make Claude or similar AI learn and improve every iteration.
• Open-source tools, slash commands, skills, and Playwright-based validation make this approach accessible now.
• AI engineering is becoming more about orchestration and knowledge management than raw coding. Approach it like you’d onboard a new team member: systematize learnings and processes, and let the AI handle more each time.

Find Kieran on X (Twitter), and check out the open-source compound engineering plugin via the episode notes.

This summary captures the full flow and practical value of the episode for engineers, tech leads, and power users aiming to level up their AI code automation game.