You asked Claude to build a feature. It worked. You shipped it. Six weeks later, you're adding something related, and nothing makes sense anymore. The code is technically correct but completely opaque. You can't remember why anything was structured this way. Claude can't figure it out either — it starts guessing, and the guesses start breaking things. This is the scenario I keep seeing. And it's not really a Claude problem. It's a workflow problem. The real issue: you're generating before you've defined When you prompt Claude without first establishing the structure of your system, a few things happen: Claude fills in ambiguity with plausible-sounding assumptions You accept those assumptions because the code works The assumptions pile up across sessions You end up with a codebase that reflects Claude's guesses, not your actual design intent The code isn't wrong. But it's nobody's code. No one owns the decisions, so no one can maintain them.…