Finally set up Claude Code properly with the official plugins instead of duct-taping my own config — should've done this months ago

Kept putting off actually configuring Claude Code properly because my ad hoc setup mostly worked. Finally sat down and went through the official plugins instead of avoiding it, and it's made a bigger difference than I expected.

The main thing that changed for me is not having to re-explain the same project conventions every session. Once the relevant plugin was set up, a lot of the "here's how we do things in this repo" context I used to paste in manually was just... already there. Feels obvious in hindsight but I was doing everything by hand for way too long.

Also stopped fighting the terminal-vs-editor split I had going, using it directly where I'm already working instead of bouncing between windows cut down on a surprising amount of friction I didn't realize was friction until it was gone.

Not trying to oversell it, still ran into a couple of rough edges getting things set up the way I wanted, and there's definitely a learning curve if you're coming from a fully manual workflow. But net positive, wish I'd done this earlier instead of assuming my own setup was "good enough."

Curious what other people's actual setup looks like — official plugins, custom configs, some mix? And if you were slow to adopt something like this too, what finally got you to switch?