Guides
Practical guides to AI-assisted development, terminals, and coding workflows.
Crystl's Book of Spells
Master crystl with a grimoire of powerful prompts. Summon heroes, assemble a party, revive shards, and complete epic quests.
open the book →
The crystl filesystem
An interactive map of every file crystl touches: the private .crystl/ workspace in each gem, and what travels with your repo vs. stays on your Mac.
What Is Claude Code? A Practical Guide
Claude Code is a command-line AI coding assistant from Anthropic that works directly in your terminal. Learn what it does, how it works, and how to get started.
AI Coding Assistants in 2026: A Practical Overview
A guide to the current landscape of AI coding assistants: what they do, how they differ, and how to choose the right one for your workflow.
How to Configure Claude Code with CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and Skills
Learn how to use CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and SKILL.md files to configure Claude Code for your projects. Understand what each file does and how to manage them with the crystl Library.
How to Set Up Your Terminal for AI-Assisted Development
A practical guide to configuring your terminal environment for AI coding tools like Claude Code, including shell setup, workflows, and productivity tips.
Managing Multiple AI Coding Sessions Without Losing Track
How to run multiple Claude Code instances and parallel agents across projects: naming sessions, tracking which one is waiting on you, and keeping live edits in separate git worktrees.
How to run AI coding agents for longer without babysitting them
Your coding agent keeps stopping. Usually it's just waiting on you. Here's how to keep it (or a whole team of them) working for hours instead of minutes.
Git Worktree: What It Is and How to Use It
A git worktree checks out a second branch of the same repository into its own folder. What worktrees are, how git worktree add works, the full command set, the gotchas, and when to use one instead of a branch.
Terminal Emulators for Running Multiple AI Agents
Fast terminals like Ghostty and Alacritty are tuned to draw one session as quickly as possible. Run three or four AI coding agents at once and that design starts taxing your CPU. Here's why, and how crystl's cavrn engine is built to run many agents at once.
AI Pair Programming: How It Works and How to Do It Well
A practical guide to pair programming with AI coding assistants. Learn the workflow, best practices, and how to get better results from AI-assisted development.
Using AI for Code Review and Quality
How to use AI coding assistants for code review, catching bugs, and improving code quality. Practical techniques and workflow tips.
Multi-Agent Development with crystl quest
How to run multiple AI coding agents on the same project simultaneously using crystl quest. Covers party setup, open vs sealed mode, hero roles, quest chat, and remote SSH workflows.
Claude Code Project Setup: Every Config File Explained
A complete reference for setting up a Claude Code project: settings.json, CLAUDE.local.md, .mcp.json, hooks, permissions, and the full configuration hierarchy.
Claude Code Subagents, Explained
A subagent is a helper Claude Code spawns in its own context window. It does the work, returns a summary, and throws away everything else. Here's what that costs you, when it's the right call, and when a separate session beats it.
Claude Code Agents: The Four Things People Mean
"Claude Code agents" means four different things: subagents, parallel sessions, background tasks, and agent definition files. Here's what each one actually is, when to use it, and why advice written for one breaks when you apply it to another.
tmux for AI Coding Agents
A working tmux setup for running Claude Code and other AI agents: session-per-project naming, pane layouts, send-keys for scripting an agent, capture-pane for reading one back, and the status-line monitor. Plus the limits you hit at four agents.
AI Agent Orchestration Tools, Compared Honestly
Most AI agent orchestration platforms are frameworks for building multi-agent systems in Python. A smaller set of tools supervise the coding agents you already run. This guide separates the two, names what's in each, and helps you work out which problem you have.
CLAUDE.md File: What It Is and How to Write One
A CLAUDE.md file is the instructions Claude Code reads at the start of every session. Where to put one, what belongs in it, what to leave out, and a full example you can copy.
CLAUDE.md Best Practices
How to write a CLAUDE.md that agents follow: keep it short, make every rule checkable, give the reason, cut what the code already says, and move the rest into rules and skills.