Claude Code has a dozen ways to research a question — from a single MCP call to a 98-agent adversarial pipeline. This guide maps every research tool by cost, agent count, and use case so you pick the right one the first time. Includes the full source of a custom deep-research-plus workflow that adds a Perplexity search lane to Claude Code's built-in deep-research pipeline.
Read articleLLM context windows have a marketed size and a useful size, and they're not the same number. Research shows quality degrades gradually based on absolute token count, not fill percentage, and a 1M-token model at 40% full is far more degraded than a 200K model at 40%. Here's the research behind the Smart Zone, the Warn Zone, and the Dumb Zone, plus a Claude Code statusline that tracks which zone you're in and how deep.
Read articleOpus 5 scores 96.0% on SWE-bench Verified vs Opus 4.6's 80.8%, a 15-point gap. But on blind user-preference coding leaderboards, Opus 4.6 ranks 4th (ELO 1547) while Opus 5 ranks 11th (ELO 1530). Synthetic benchmarks and human preference are telling opposite stories. I ran a two-round adversarial research workflow to figure out which signal to trust and landed on a mixed-model strategy.
Read article
Learn how to configure MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers globally for Claude Code, making them available across all your projects.
Read article
