I moonlight as a solo dev building a native Mac app, mostly nights and weekends. I started this with two objectives: to learn how to best use AI coding tools and to build tools that would help me in my day job. I started the first project about a year ago and was new to Claude Code. I had an idea for what I wanted the project to be, but it was all in my mind, not written anywhere. After a few weeks of what was essentially vibe coding, the results were ok, but definitely not great. AI slop would be strong, but vibe coded mess is very fair. While working on that project, debugging AWS Lambda logs became a real pain. I decided to pause that project because a tool to help my debugging seemed more useful and interesting and because I knew that the vibe coded mess would need to be refactored at some point. I wanted to learn and apply a better process before I attempted the refactor. When I set out on the new project, I decided to take a different approach: make a plan. I felt that this better modeled how we have been building software for decades and that it would likely yield better results than what I produced in the first project. Before writing any code, I wrote a spec/product vision document. Nothing fancy, just a few paragraphs of the problems that I wanted the app to solve. Then with Claude interviewing me and doing all the writing, I created 17 epics and 272 user stories for the app. The stories all contained the usual “As a user, I would…” and thorough acceptance criteria. This will surprise no one: The results were far better in the second project with this process than the first project from vibe coding. Work was getting done in fewer turns, more was right the first time, and the code quality was significantly better. It was not perfect and things still went wrong at times, but it was far better than my “process” on the first project. This is not anything groundbreaking, just recounting my realization that while AI can shorten the effort for activities that we previously did manually, shortcutting proven process and hoping that AI will guess right and fill in the blanks leads to slop. Now that the second project has launched, I am curious to learn about how other solo devs approach working with AI coding tools on bigger projects. Do you write a spec and stories up front, keep a running context file for the agent, or just prompt as you go? And if you do plan ahead, how far ahead before it stops paying off? submitted by /u/quietmacbuilder
Originally posted by u/quietmacbuilder on r/ClaudeCode
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