There's a specific kind of project failure that's hard to recognize because it doesn't feel like failure at the time.
You open Claude. You describe what you need. Code appears. It runs. You commit. Repeat.
Six weeks later, you're staring at a codebase that technically works but that nobody — including you — can safely touch. Adding a feature feels like defusing a bomb. The tests pass but you don't trust them. You're scared to refactor because everything is connected in ways you can't quite see.
This is the most common shape of AI-assisted technical debt, and it's not caused by bad prompts. It's caused by not having a clear process for how you work with Claude — not just what you ask it.
The confidence gap
