Overview

Claude’s latest Code feature allows engineers to build hooks into their prompts, sub-agents, and skills, enabling specialized self-validating agents that automatically check their own work. This addresses the critical trust gap in agent automation by adding deterministic validation layers that save engineering time and increase reliability.

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Key Takeaways

  • Build focused agents that do one thing extraordinarily well - specialized agents with single purposes consistently outperform generalist agents across thousands of runs
  • Implement post-tool-use hooks for automatic validation - agents can now run custom validation scripts after every file operation, creating closed-loop systems that catch errors immediately
  • Use specialized validation instead of generic checks - each agent should validate work specific to its purpose (CSV formatting, HTML structure, etc.) rather than running broad validation
  • Don’t delegate learning to your agents - engineers must still read documentation and understand the tools they’re building with, or risk starting a self-deprecation process where they stop growing

Topics Covered