For over a decade, the standard advice for building an efficient coding setup was to bloat your IDE with fifty different plugins. I’m telling you right now: that’s a bottleneck. After 14 years of wrestling with legacy WordPress code and broken WooCommerce checkouts, I’ve moved the majority of my logic out of the heavy UI and into the terminal. If you’re still clicking through folders while an AI agent waits for context, you’re losing time.
Why a Terminal-First Efficient Coding Setup Wins
We need to talk about context switching. It’s the silent killer of productivity. Most developers lose hours jumping between VS Code, a browser for documentation, and a terminal for Git. Recently, I shifted my daily driver to a combination of Warp and Claude Code. This isn’t just a “shiny new tool” reaction; it’s about reducing cognitive load.
When I’m refactoring a messy functions.php or debugging a race condition in a custom transient, I don’t want to leave my execution environment. By running Claude Code directly in Warp, the terminal becomes the orchestrator. I can fire off an agent to “Simplify this hook logic” while I’m simultaneously checking production logs in a split pane.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into this specific agentic flow, check out my guide on how to maximize Claude Code effectiveness for senior developers.
The Magic of Git Worktrees for Parallel Agents
Here is where most “AI-first” workflows break: collision. If you have three different agents updating files in the same repository simultaneously, you’re going to run into a Git nightmare. The solution I use in my efficient coding setup is Git Worktrees.
Instead of one working directory, I create linked copies of the repo for each agent. This allows me to have one agent fixing a CSS alignment bug in one “branch” (worktree) while another agent backfills a database migration in another. They don’t touch each other’s files, and I can review the PRs separately. Consequently, my output has tripled without the usual merge conflict headaches.
# Create a new worktree for an AI agent to fix a bug
git worktree add ../bugfix-agent-1 feat/fix-checkout-validation
# Now fire off Claude Code inside that directory
cd ../bugfix-agent-1
claude
Refactoring Messy Hooks: An AI Example
One of the biggest benefits of this setup is refactoring legacy code. We’ve all seen the “God Function” in WordPress—a 500-line hook that handles everything from email notifications to stock updates. Using a frontier model like Claude 3.7 Sonnet, I can provide the whole file as context and ask for a refactor using proper OOP principles.
Observe the difference between a naive, bloated approach and a clean, agent-refactored version. Specifically, the agent understands that WordPress filters should be pure functions whenever possible.
<?php
/**
* The Naive Approach: Bloated hook
*/
add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_completed', function( $order_id ) {
$order = wc_get_order( $order_id );
// Logic for emails, logging, and external APIs all crammed here...
error_log( 'Order complete: ' . $order_id );
} );
/**
* The Refactored Approach: Decoupled and Testable
*/
final class bbioon_Order_Processor {
public static function init() {
add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_completed', [ __CLASS__, 'handle_completion' ] );
}
public static function handle_completion( int $order_id ) {
$order = wc_get_order( $order_id );
if ( ! $order ) return;
self::log_status( $order );
self::sync_external_api( $order );
}
private static function log_status( $order ) {
// Precise logging logic
}
}
bbioon_Order_Processor::init();
Slash Commands for Prompt Consistency
Furthermore, I utilize slash commands to maintain consistency. If you write out a long prompt every time you want a PR description, you’re doing it wrong. I have stored prompts for:
- Running WP-CLI commands across multi-site environments.
- Generating semantic PR descriptions from Git diffs.
- Cleaning up transients and object cache bottlenecks.
This ensures that the model always follows my coding standards (like prefixing functions with bbioon_) without me having to remind it every five minutes. For more on fixing technical debt through better organization, read my post on fixing your WordPress development workflow.
Look, if this Efficient Coding Setup stuff is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Takeaway: It’s About Flow, Not Features
At the end of the day, an efficient coding setup isn’t about having the most expensive subscription. It’s about creating a environment where you spend 90% of your time solving problems and 10% managing your tools. By moving to a terminal-first workflow with Claude Code and Git Worktrees, you remove the friction between your intent and the code. Stop fighting your IDE and start shipping.
