I have 160 Claude Code hooks. The 5 that pay rent every day.

$ ls ~/.claude/hooks/ | wc -l 160 $ ls ~/.claude/rules/ | wc -l 95 $ ls ~/.claude/skills/ | wc -l 75 That is the state of my Claude Code setup as of this morning. Most people stop at one or two hooks. Most people then complain that Claude "forgets" rules. Claude does not forget. It never had the rule enforced in the first place. A rule in a markdown file is a suggestion. A rule in a hook is a wall. Here are the five hook patterns that actually pay rent in my daily flow. Each one solves a class of problem you cannot fix with prompt engineering. 1.