A few months ago I was burning through my Claude Code usage before lunch. Every session felt the same: I'd describe a bug or a feature conversationally, Claude would go read half the codebase to figure out what I meant, guess at the fix, get it half right, and then I'd spend three more messages correcting course. More tokens, more time, worse code.
I fixed it — and the fix had almost nothing to do with "prompting tricks." It came down to changing when I write the prompt and how much thinking I front-load into it, instead of leaving that thinking for Claude to do live, in the loop, on my token budget.
Here's exactly what changed.
The real problem wasn't Claude — it was conversational implementation
When you talk to an agent conversationally ("hey can you fix the auth bug"), the agent has to do three expensive things before it writes a single line:
