A turn in Claude Code is one complete cycle from your message through tool calls to a response. Understanding turns changes how you structure work, manage context windows, and build automated hooks that fire at precisely the right moment in the lifecycle.
Andrej Karpathy coined vibe coding then hand-coded his next serious project because AI agents were net unhelpful. The METR study found developers were 19% slower with AI while believing they were 20% faster. Here are the dos and donts that matter when you need to ship.
Your team uses Claude but everyone has different prompts and context. Claude Projects by Anthropic treats AI as shared working memory, not documentation that goes stale. An ArXiv study found 67% of new developer tasks involve relearning things someone already knows.
Mid-size teams need Claude usage monitoring to justify AI tool spending. DX research from Abi Noda found only 60% of teams use AI tools frequently. Here is how to track what matters using simple metrics, lightweight tools, and clear ROI calculations without turning monitoring into surveillance.
The cursor vs github copilot debate misses the point. One is a coding assistant that fits your existing IDE, the other is a complete AI-first development environment. With studies showing 26% productivity gains but also 19% slowdowns, the choice depends on your team profile more than feature lists.
Your Mac and Linux machines come with grep, find, and cat - tools from the 1970s. Modern alternatives like ripgrep and fd run 10-100x faster, output JSON for AI workflows, and install in 30 minutes.
Most companies hand developers Windows machines and wonder why work takes longer than it should. The problem is not the hardware. It is 37 missing tools that Unix and Mac provide out of the box.