alt Hacker News> Serious planning. The plans should include constraints, scope, escalation criteria, completion criteria, test and documentation plan.
I feel like i am a bit stupid to be not able to do this. my process is more iterative. i start working on a feature then i disocover some other function thats silightly related. go refactor into commmon code then proceed with original task. sometimes i stop midway and see if this can be done with a libarary somewhere and go look at example. i take many detours like these. I am never working on a single task like a robot. i dont want claude to work like that either .That seems so opposite of how my brain works.
what i am missing.
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You seem to work a lot like how I do. If that is being stupid, then well, count me in too. To be honest, if I had to go through all the work of planning, scope, escalation criteria, etc., then I would probably be better off just writing the damn code myself at that point.
Again, here's what works for me.
When I get an idea for something I want to build, I will usually spend time talking to ChatGPT about it. I'll request deep research on existing implementations, relevant technologies and algorithms, and a survey of literature. I find NotebookLM helps a lot at this point, as does Elevenreader (I tend to listen to these reports while walking or doing the dishes or what have you). I feed all of those into ChatGPT Deep Research along with my own thoughts about the direction the system, and ask it to produce a design document.
That gets me something like this:
https://github.com/leynos/spycatcher-harness/blob/main/docs/...
If I need further revisions, I'll ask Codex or Claude Code to do those.
Finally, I break that down into a roadmap of phases, steps and achievable tasks using a prompt that defines what I want from each of those.
That gets me this:
https://github.com/leynos/spycatcher-harness/blob/main/docs/...
Then I use an adapted version of OpenAI's execplans recipe to plan out each task (https://github.com/leynos/agent-helper-scripts/blob/main/ski...).
The task plans end up looking like this:
https://github.com/leynos/spycatcher-harness/blob/main/docs/...
At the moment, I use Opus or GPT-5.4 on high to generate those plans, and Sonnet or GPT-5.4 medium to implement.
The roadmap and the design are definitely not set in stone. Each step is a learning opportunity, and I'll often change the direction of the project based on what I learn during the planning and implementation. And of course, this is just what works for me. The fun of the last few months has been everyone finding out what works for them.