Longer reads that give away the working part. If a guide saves you the purchase, that is a fine outcome.
Last updated: 2026-09-22
Four files, and five of the fifteen minutes are one step. The allowlist that stops the permission prompts, what you can safely skip on day one, and the two things that waste an afternoon.
Where SKILL.md goes for project, personal, monorepo and plugin scope, the frontmatter fields, and the one line that decides whether a skill ever fires on its own.
Exit 2 blocks a tool call and exit 1 does not, which is the whole contract and the reason most hand-written hooks protect nothing. A full hook, the no-jq fallback, and how to test it in a minute without Claude Code.
.mcp.json that travelsTwo of the three MCP scopes write to a file only you ever see, and claude mcp add defaults to one of them. The schema, the ${VAR} rules, and the credential names that expand to an empty string on purpose.
A wrong CLAUDE.md is unhelpful; a wrong hook keeps running and stops protecting you, with no symptom. The one-line rig that catches it, and why the allow cases matter more than the blocks.
What a CLAUDE.md is, why it keeps asking permission, and what a finished setup actually contains — in plain language, for founders, PMs and ops.
The five things that stop people in their first week, each with the cause, the fix, and the reasons the fix does not take.
Setup Lite is $29: a CLAUDE.md, a tool allowlist and one skill written from your repo, handed back as a pull request you review, about 24 hours from a complete intake. Or copy the free starter and work through these guides — it is the same shape, and we would rather you had it than nothing.
Free starter repo Setup Lite $29