Story: I’m a solo founder building a SaaS for small businesses. When Claude Code came out, I thought I’d 10x my output. Instead, I 10x’d my planning. The real problem wasn’t Claude. It was me. I’d ask for a button. Then I’d think: “What if we need this in other places too?” So I’d ask Claude to make it reusable. Then I’d wonder about edge cases. Then state management. Then… Three hours later: no button. But a very impressive component architecture diagram. Claude was just doing what I asked. The problem was that I kept asking for more. Yesterday I caught myself researching “codemoot”. A quite nice CLI that lets Claude and GPT debate each other. Multi-model code reviews! Token budget tracking! Adjudication rounds! WOW. I already had npm install in my terminal. Then I stopped. And asked myself one question. “Does this solve a problem I have RIGHT NOW?” The honest answer: No. I already get second opinions by pasting code into ChatGPT. Takes 30 seconds. Works fine. I was about to mass time building infrastructure for a problem I’d already solved. Enter Boris. Boris is Dario Amodei’s co-founder at Anthropic. I’ve watched his interviews. His philosophy: vanilla, clean, minimal. Ship, don’t plan. So I made Boris my inner voice. I added this to my AGENTS.md:
Boris-Test Before building anything, ask: “Does this solve a problem you have RIGHT NOW?” If the answer is “could be useful” → YAGNI. Stop.
The shift Now Claude asks ME the hard question. Before every PRD. Before every feature. Before every “improvement.” “Could be useful” → Killed and rejected “Pilot customer asked for this yesterday” → Build I needed guardrails. Not from Claude. From myself. The irony: The most powerful thing I taught my AI assistant was to protect me from my own enthusiasm. My PRs are small again. I ship daily. My pilot customers get features they actually requested. submitted by /u/Necessary-Spare18
Originally posted by u/Necessary-Spare18 on r/ClaudeCode
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