How I unified research and engineering workflows with Claude Code

SaltsMoon · reddit · 2026-08-29

The author details a unified workflow using Claude Code for both research and engineering tasks.

Core Process:

Initialization: Voice input requirements; Claude designs the file structure.
Context Prep: Gather papers (research) or API docs (engineering) beforehand. Preparing context upfront is more stable than letting the agent search live.
Key PDF Handling Trick: Directly feeding PDFs to the agent is unstable (missing formulas/tables). The solution is converting PDFs to Markdown first using the KolmoPDF API before analysis.
Execution: Generate a Plan first, confirm interactively, then execute while supervising for drift.

Key Takeaways:

Reduce third-party search/MCP components; native model search covers most needs and improves stability.
Offloading credentials/API management to Claude frees up mental energy for problem-solving.

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