I kept hitting the same wall. I'd have a "perfect" app idea in my head, get excited, and start building from scratch with no real preparation. Halfway through, I'd get stuck — rewriting half the code and throwing away the other half.
For a long time I blamed the tools. But the problem wasn't the AI's code. It was me. When I didn't give Claude a proper plan, it designed things its own way: a different data model, a different structure than I had in mind. Then I'd spend the rest of the project chasing it and fixing things.
So I asked two communities how they write that first plan. The answers changed how I work. Here's the workflow I landed on.
1. Stop trying to write the perfect plan
The most freeing advice I got: keep the first spec ugly and short. I'd been frozen because I thought the design had to be perfect and cover everything. It doesn't — and it can't. An app isn't finished at the start; it's finished at the end, based on what the user actually needs. Everything changes along the way.
