Watch someone use Claude Code for the first week and you’ll see them type English at it, exclusively. Which works. It’s also like owning a car and only ever using first gear.
There are three separate channels for talking to Claude Code, and they are genuinely different things — different syntax, different timing, and different costs. Two of them don’t involve the model at all.
flowchart TB
subgraph T["In your terminal, before the session"]
A["claude --model opus --add-dir ../api"]
end
subgraph S["Inside the session, at the start of a line"]
B["/context /compact /doctor"]
end
subgraph P["Inside the prompt, mid-sentence"]
C["explain @src/auth.js and check !git log"]
end
T --> S --> P
Get these three straight and everything else in this handbook has somewhere to live.
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