A skill wouldn't be a bad option though, and I highly recommend creating one yourself! The ability to customize our workflows and tools to a high degree is one of the largest strengths of agentic coding.

Ive had great success with it, and it rapidly speeds up development time at fairly minimal cost.

he AI is there to do the easy part; scan a giant spaghetti bowl and label each noodle. The humans job is to attach descriptions to those noodles.

Sometimes I forget that people on this site simply assume the worst in any given situation.

see, i actually read and monitor the outputs. i check them against my own internal knowledge. i trial the results with real trouble shooting and real bug fixes/feature requests.

when its wrong, i fix it. when its right, great we now have documentation where none existed before.

dogfood the documentation and you'll know if its worth using or not.

If there is an action you don't want them to ever take, dont provide them with the ability to do so.

What I give Claude is an API key that allows it to talk to the mcp server. Everything else is hidden behind that.

This is what I do, and I am 100% confident that Claude cannot drop my database or truncate a table, or read from sensitive tables. I know this because the tool it uses to interface with the database doesn't have those capabilities, thus Claude doesn't have that capability.

It won't save you from Claude maliciously ex-filtrating data it has access to via DNS or some other side channel, but it will protect from worst-case scenarios.

Also, in many non-tech companies the database admins were historically a consistent IT resource even when no other developers were available, so SQL gets leveraged extensively. When your only tool is a hammer, most of your problems end up being weirdly nail shaped.

AI is excellent at mapping from one format to another.

I use this method to great affect.

When you are being scraper there are two possible reactions: 1 - good, because someone scraping your data is going to help you make a sale (discoverability) 2 - bad, work to obfuscate/block/prevent access.

In the first case, introducing a complex new standard that few if any will adopt achieves nothing compared to "here's a link for all the data in one spot, now leave my site alone. cheers".

In the second case, you actively don't want your data scraped, so why would you ever adopt this?

If you are reading all the inventory data into context then you are doing it wrong. Use your LLM to analyze the website and build a mapping for the HTML data, then parse using traditional methods (bs4 works nicely). You'll save yourself a gajillion tokens and get more consistent and accurate results at 1000x the speed.