Stop Rebuilding Your Claude Code Setup From Scratch
Every new Claude Code project starts the same way. You open a fresh repo, copy your CLAUDE.md from the last project, tweak the rules that don't apply, add back the skills you reached for last time, re-wire the MCP servers, and 30 minutes later you're finally ready to write code.
Multiply that by 8 projects a month and it's not a small tax. It's the whole productivity loss everyone complains about.
The real leverage isn't a better prompt. It's treating your context as versioned, installable files instead of a blob you keep rewriting.
Three specific things changed how I work:
CLAUDE.md as a rules file you inherit from a shared base. I keep a "base.md" with git workflow, review-don't-rewrite discipline, no-secrets rules — every project extends it and adds 3–5 project-specific lines. Copy once, tweak once, done.
Skills as reusable packages with one-line install. Each skill is a SKILL.md + whatever scripts it needs. The rule: if I've written it twice, it gets extracted into its own folder and committed somewhere I can pull it from by name.
MCP configs as shared dependencies. The list of servers I want available — github, postgres, playwright, a few custom ones — lives in a central file, not buried in every project's settings.
Once you frame it this way, the parallel to npm becomes impossible to miss. CLAUDE.md is your package.json. Skills are your dependencies. The missing piece is a registry — somewhere you can publish and install from.
That's the bet behind tokrepo — an open registry for Claude Code skills, MCP servers, and prompt templates. No secret sauce, no paywall, just files you can pull into any project with a single command. The compounding effect kicks in the moment you stop treating every session as isolated.
The developers who feel like they have a superpower right now aren't using a smarter model. They've built a personal library they pull into every new project. That's it. That's the whole trick.
If you're rebuilding your setup every time, the fix isn't "prompt better." The fix is to version-control what you already know works, then share it with yourself the next time you start fresh.