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Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

betweentheprompts.com

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Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#51

Post by SkyPuncher »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #42
mattmanser wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel TDD ended up fizzling out quite a bit in the industry, with some evangelists later admitting they'd taken to often writing the code first, then the tests. To me it's always felt like waterfall in disguise and just didn't fit how I make programs. I feel it's just not a good way to build a complex system with unknown unknowns. That the AI design process seems to rely on this same pattern feels off to me, and sho…

TDD fizzled because not enough emphasis was put on writing high level tests which matched user stories and too much emphasis was put on it as a tool of design.

No, TDD failed because it assumed you could design a perfect systems before implementation.

It’s a totally waste of time to do TDD to only find out you made a bad design choice or discovered a conflicting problem.

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#52

Post by matijsvzuijlen »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #51
MoreQARespect wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TDD fizzled because not enough emphasis was put on writing high level tests which matched user stories and too much emphasis was put on it as a tool of design.

No, TDD failed because it assumed you could design a perfect systems before implementation. It’s a totally waste of time to do TDD to only find out you made a bad design choice or discovered a conflicting problem.

What makes you think TDD assumes that? It sounds like the complete opposite of what TDD is about.

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#53

Post by danmaz74 »

a_bonobo wrote: post #31
hetspookjee wrote: post #6

Over the last 2 weeks (evenings only) I've spend a lot of time crafting the "perfect prompt" for claude code to one shot the project. I ended up with a rather small CLAUDE.md file that references 8 other MD files, ranging from project_architecture, models_spec, build_sequence, test_hierarchy, test_scenarios, and some other files. It is a project for model based governance of Databricks Unity Catalog, with which I do…

I feel we're developing something like what made Test-Driven Development so strong: TTD forced you to sit down and design your system first, rather than making it all up on the fly. In the past we mapped the system while we were building the code for it. This kind of AI-driven development feels very similar to that. By forcing you to sit down and map the territory you're planning to build in, the coding itself become…

> "TTD forced you to sit down and design your system first, rather than making it all up on the fly"

It's interesting because I remember having discussions with a colleague who was a fervent proponent of TDD where he said that with that approach you "just let the tests drive you" and "don't need to sit down and design your system first" (which I found a terrible idea).

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#54

Post by jstummbillig »

roessland wrote: post #22
k9294 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not to subscribe to pro or max? I calculated my CC usage this month (I'm on a Max 200$ plan), it’s close to 2.5k$... Its just crazy to use API at price right now.

I wish I could, but they banned me and won't disclose why. That being said, Claude Code produces the best code I've seen from an AI coding agent, and the subscriptions are a steal.

I heard Codex CLI is doing good things now, might give that a go (I have not yet).

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#55

Post by copirate »

mattmanser wrote: post #38
a_bonobo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel we're developing something like what made Test-Driven Development so strong: TTD forced you to sit down and design your system first, rather than making it all up on the fly. In the past we mapped the system while we were building the code for it. This kind of AI-driven development feels very similar to that. By forcing you to sit down and map the territory you're planning to build in, the coding itself become…

I feel TDD ended up fizzling out quite a bit in the industry, with some evangelists later admitting they'd taken to often writing the code first, then the tests. To me it's always felt like waterfall in disguise and just didn't fit how I make programs. I feel it's just not a good way to build a complex system with unknown unknowns. That the AI design process seems to rely on this same pattern feels off to me, and sho…

"Extreme programming" methodology said you should not do TDD if you don't already know how to implement the code. In that case you should instead experiment until you know, and then throw away the experiments and write the code test-first.

Maybe it should be done that way with AI: experiment with AI if you need to, then write a plan with AI, then let the AI do the implementation.

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#56

Post by afro88 »

This is the key to getting decent feature work out of Claude Code. I've had good success recently using GPT-5 High (in Cursor) to write the plan, then take that to Claude Code to implement.

You can get an extra 15-20% out of it if you also document the parts of the codebase you expect to change first. Let the plan model document how it works, architecture and patterns. Then plan your feature with this in the context. You'll get better code out of it.

Also, make sure you review, revise and/or hand edit the docs and plans too. That pays significant dividends down the line.

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#57

Post by jmull »

a_bonobo wrote: post #31
hetspookjee wrote: post #6

Over the last 2 weeks (evenings only) I've spend a lot of time crafting the "perfect prompt" for claude code to one shot the project. I ended up with a rather small CLAUDE.md file that references 8 other MD files, ranging from project_architecture, models_spec, build_sequence, test_hierarchy, test_scenarios, and some other files. It is a project for model based governance of Databricks Unity Catalog, with which I do…

I feel we're developing something like what made Test-Driven Development so strong: TTD forced you to sit down and design your system first, rather than making it all up on the fly. In the past we mapped the system while we were building the code for it. This kind of AI-driven development feels very similar to that. By forcing you to sit down and map the territory you're planning to build in, the coding itself become…

Test-driven and prompt-driven development aside, I never understood why people (and groups) spend many hours (or 1000s, or 10000s of hours) building things when they don't really know what they're building.

(I've certainly seen it done though, with predicable result.)

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#58

Post by garciasn »

afro88 wrote: post #56

This is the key to getting decent feature work out of Claude Code. I've had good success recently using GPT-5 High (in Cursor) to write the plan, then take that to Claude Code to implement. You can get an extra 15-20% out of it if you also document the parts of the codebase you expect to change first. Let the plan model document how it works, architecture and patterns. Then plan your feature with this in the context.…

We have Google Workspace at work and I find Gemini is awesome at “academic style” writeups but less good at writing code compared to CC.

So; I have Gemini write up plans for something, having it go deep and be as explicit as possible in its explanations.

I feed this into CC and have it implement the change in my code base. This has been really strong for me in making new features or expanding upon others where I feel something should be considerably improved.

The product I’ve built from the ground up over the last 8w is now in production and being actively demoed to clients. I am beyond thrilled with my experience and its output. As I’ve mentioned before on HN, we could have done much of this work ourselves with our existing staff, but we could not have done the front end work. What I feel might have taken well over a year and way more engineering and data science effort was mostly done in 2m. Features are added in seconds rather than hours.

I’m amazed by CC and I love reading these articles which help me to realize my own journey is being mirrored by others.

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#59

Post by Den_VR »

ionwake wrote: post #44
unixhero wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well waterfall is how we built the old world. Piece by piece, module by module, roads, bridges, buildings, boats.

I got intrigued by your comment, I couldn't wrap my head about a process just changing. Got AI to throw out this table, but I think its of interest: Waterfall ~1970, Agile ~2001, Continuous (DevOps) ~2015, Autonomous Dev ~2030, Self-Evolving Systems ~2040, Goal-Directed Ecosystems ~2050+

What do you think about “goal-directed ecosystems” mapping to Mulder’s Collaborative Agent Maturity Model (CAMM)?

Re: Turning Claude Code into my best design partner

#60

Post by divan »

zuInnp wrote: post #39

What I don't get about all the "if you plan it out first, it gets better" approach is, how did they work before?! For anything bigger than small size features, I always think about what I do and why I do things. Sometimes in my head, sometimes on paper, a Confluence page or a white board. I don't really get it. 80 % of software engineering is to figure out what you need and how to achieve this. You check with the sta…

That might be true for large dev teams with an established culture. But a lot of development is happening in different settings - solo projects, small teams, weekend side-projects, personal tools crafting, quick POC coding, etc. Not all software is a complex product that needs to be sold and maintained. One thing that I always loved about being a developer is that you can create any custom piece of software you need for yourself – even if it's for a single-time task - and don't care about releasing/supporting corner cases/other users.

In almost all these cases, development process is a mix of coding & discovering, updating the mental model of the code on the go. It almost never starts with docs, spec or tests. Some projects are good for TDD, but some don't even need it.

And even for these use-cases, using AI coding agents changes the game here. Now it does really matter to first describe the idea, put it into spec, and verbalize everything in your head that you think will matter for the project.

Nowadays, the hottest programming language is English, indeed.

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