When to reach for ClaudeTag vs Claude Code — and an interleaved self-test across the whole course.
They're one lineage — Anthropic calls ClaudeTag "the beginning of an evolution of Claude Code."[ref §8] The split is about mode, not capability:
| Claude Code | ClaudeTag | |
|---|---|---|
| You are | in the loop, turn by turn | delegating; it works async |
| Best for | deep hands-on work in a repo | a standing duty a team watches |
| Initiative | reactive | proactive (ambient) |
| Memory | session / files you supply | persistent, channel-scoped |
Rule of thumb: reach for Claude Code when you are driving a hard change; reach for ClaudeTag when a recurring duty should run where the team can see it — triage, on-call, status, monitoring.
You designed a complete prism-ops ClaudeTag, one lesson at a time:
The one idea underneath all of it: a great agent setup is a scoped, budgeted, audited delegation contract — in Slack or anywhere else. That's the transferable win for every prompt you write.
Questions jump across lessons on purpose — mixing topics is what turns fluency into durable recall.
Which belongs in the "constraints" part of a delegation task?
Constraints bound what the agent may do and its risk (L5). The spend cap is budget-clause governance (L1/L7); channel membership isn't part of the task.
Ambient mode goes silent through a real incident. Most likely cause?
Loudness is judged against the baseline (L3). Too loose → it misses the real event. The audit log records actions but doesn't drive alerts; membership is irrelevant.
Why should #research and #prism-ops be separate identities?
Separate identities = separate blast radii: least-privilege tools + isolated memory (L4). It's not about speed, and a Claude can serve many channels.
A task exceeds the spend cap. The safe, actual behaviour is:
Fail-closed: declined entirely, not partial (L7) — the same instinct as your risk controls. No half-runs, no silent credit draw.
A months-old channel memory cites a burned account. You should:
Memory is "true when written" and admins can edit/delete it (L6). Curate stale entries; it doesn't self-refresh and caps are unrelated.
You can explain ClaudeTag, decide when to use it, design a scoped and governed one for Prism, and — the actual mission — write the delegation contracts that make any agent behave. That's the whole thing.