Reading about Claude Code hooks isn’t enough. You have to build with them.

Here’s what to try:
Intercept the stop event. Run a validation check. If something’s missing, block the exit.

That’s the shift, from trusting the AI to enforcing completion.

Our code review bot was burning through API costs.

So we stopped sending the full codebase with every check.

Instead, we retrieve only relevant modules.

Same reviews, much lower cost.

Small repo? Send all. Large codebase? Use RAG.

We assumed bigger context windows would improve our AI coding workflow.

Instead, we saw slower responses and higher cost.

What changed:
* Pass only relevant files
* Retrieve extra context

Treat context as working memory, not a database.

Ever hit this?

We hit a wall with larger codebases.

Started getting inconsistent changes. Turns out single sessions lose coherence.

So we switched to parallel sessions...

One handled architecture, another backend, another frontend.

And work stopped waiting.