Last week I finally did something about the Stream Deck sitting on my desk — the little box of fifteen physical keys I use for everything except the tool I spend most of my day in.

Not familiar with a Stream Deck? It’s a box of buttons, commonly called a macro pad. Streamers use them to switch cameras and audio feeds; the rest of us use them to collapse five separate actions into one press. Instead of doing a task step by step, you assign the whole thing to a single key.

Some Stream Deck users build ready-to-use shortcut layouts for specific apps — these are called profiles — and sell or give them away. Whether you buy one or not, the appeal is the same if you’re someone who repeats the same workflows and commands ad nauseam: a button that does the complex thing for you is a win, full stop.

So, with my wrists giving me a constant, painful reminder that I spend too long typing at the keyboard, I decided to look into using the Stream Deck to interface directly with Claude Code. And it was worth it.

I’m certainly not the first person to have this idea — there are already Claude Code plugins, profiles and icon packs on the Elgato marketplace. All I’d have to do is click, pay, download and install. But that left me thinking: what’s the point of using someone else’s shortcuts for my work?

And then it hit me: the same way I use Claude to find gaps in my workflows and execution, I could ask it to do the same thing for my Stream Deck.

I’m no stranger to building Stream Deck macros by hand. But what if I went one step further, and asked Claude to identify the commands I actually use most — and get those programmed onto the keys?

That’s what turned this from “hook up the old Stream Deck and see what it can do” into “let Claude analyse, let Claude cook.”

There was no special prompting involved — just telling Claude my intentions, what I wanted the end result to look like, and giving it one or two examples to work from. The result: a simple page of folders, sitting right at my fingertips, ready to send my most-used commands straight to Claude.

Sample prompts

Read back through my saved sessions in [wherever your tool keeps
history]. Count how many times I ran each command. Give me a ranked
table of the top fifteen, with counts. Do not guess or estimate —
if you cannot find the history, say so rather than inventing it.

Open the profile currently installed on my [device] and work out the
file format from it: how keys are addressed, what a key that types
text looks like, and how folders are represented. Do not use the
documentation. Report what you found before you build anything.

Build the layout from a plain-text file I can edit, one line per key.
Then render the finished layout as an image so I can check it before
installing, and package it as a single file I can double-click.

My top row runs:

• /log-to-daily — tells Claude to append what we’ve been doing to my Daily Note in Obsidian.

• /school-brief — works through my children’s school communications, translates messages into English, and updates my daily to-do list.

• /msg-brief — summarises everything that’s come in over WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage and Signal since the last run.

• /morning-brief — generates a full start-of-day executive briefing: calendar, tasks, email and more.

• /mail-triage — processes comms across email and messaging, logs conversations to the CRM, adds tasks, saves attachments.

I also have nested folders for Tools, Weekly, and Wisdom — the last of those applies one of ten popular thinking models to whatever I’m working on.

What I love about this is that it’s not someone else’s idea of what skills I should have on here — they’re my most frequently used skills. Some of the results still caught me off guard — I didn’t expect /school-brief to rank as high as it did.

It’s made me realise I’ve probably been underusing this thing the whole time. The real shift isn’t the layout I ended up with — it’s the habit of asking Claude what else it can do with the tools I already have running on my computer.