Receipts. Always receipts.

Agent Cookbooks is a practitioner blog about Claude Code, MCP servers, hooks, subagents, skills, and CLAUDE.md patterns. Every post ships with the JSON, the timings, and the failure modes from real use — not summarized documentation. The bar: no post ships without at least one real artifact (a config that ran, a number that was measured, a failure that was hit).

If a post can't ship a receipt, it doesn't ship.

Who this is for

• Developers using Claude Code (and the rest of the AI-agent stack) for real work, on real deadlines, with a real bill at the end of the month.
• AI agent builders shipping production workflows — not demos.
• Practitioners who'd rather see the diff than read another five-tips listicle.

What's covered

• Claude Code: hooks, subagents, skills, settings.json patterns, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, slash commands, the Agent SDK.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers: setup, debugging, stdin/stdout patterns, real bills, failure modes.
• Comparisons: Claude Code vs Cursor, Aider, Codex CLI, Cline — same task, three or four ways, with timings.
• Programmatic recipes: templates, hooks, agent configs, and CLAUDE.md patterns you can copy and run today.
• Cost analyses: what real Claude Code usage looks like on a 30-day bill, with the breakdown by task type.

Why this exists

Most content about AI tooling is either polished marketing or five-tips listicles. Both leave practitioners guessing about what actually happens when you point an agent at real code, on a real deadline, with a real bill at the end of the month. Agent Cookbooks is the gap between the documentation and the actual experience.

Contact

hi@agentcookbooks.com for corrections, suggestions, and "I'd love to see a recipe for X."