For my first few weeks with Claude Code, I used it like a search engine that could type: ask a question, get some code, paste it into place. It worked well enough that I never questioned it. Then my company introduced coffee chats: 15-minute one-on-one meetings for sharing AI knowledge across the organisation. The luck of the draw paired me with Dylan Harbour, our technical director, who was already using and testing the Research–Plan–Implement framework — a way of structuring work for Claude Code where you never just ask for code, you build up to it in phases. Read more

When one prompt is not enough There is a particular way a single Claude conversation curdles when the work it carries is real. The first prompt is sharp, the next two are sharpish, and by the seventh exchange the model is no longer responding to the codebase — it is responding to the wreckage of its own earlier attempts. The work that started with a clean prompt is now competing with the residue of every misstep that preceded it. Read more