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Comment by archleaf | Hacker News Reader

So what you really mean is you are going to do better and more detailed skills files so you can get an architecture that you've thought through rather than something random?

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Partly, but the order matters. The CLAUDE.md constraints only work if you designed the architecture first. They're just how you communicate it to the AI. The mistake I made wasn't writing bad skills files, it was not designing anything at all and expecting the AI to make coherent structural decisions across 30 sessions.

The rewrite is me sitting down with a blank doc and drawing the boxes before any code exists. Then the CLAUDE.md enforces what I already decided. Whether that actually holds up as the project grows, I genuinely don't know yet.

Are you really saving any time at all using AI at all then? If you have to write the architecture for it, write all the rules you want it to follow, check everything it's written, and then reprompt it because it's not how you want it?

Yes. I do all of this and I'd estimate 50-100% coding time savings. A lot of that comes from better multitasking over single-workstream throughput, which I suppose might compromise the gains depending on what you're doing. For me it amplifies the speedup by allowing some of my "coding time" to be spent on non-coding tasks too.

But even if coding time is reduced by half, is that worth the downsides? Coding has never really been a major percentage of my time.

I could be wrong in some subtle way I'm not seeing, but I believe the model we're working in avoids the downsides. I actually think my review bar is slightly higher now, because I don't feel as much pressure to compromise my standards when I know Claude is capable of writing the code I want.

I would say the main downside is not knowing what all your code does, and where to find any particular function.

After the initial coding is complete, will you need to use AI to fix bugs? Presumably that is both slower and more expensive than doing it by hand when you know exactly where to look?

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