Six months ago I shipped a project that I was proud of. Claude wrote about 80% of the code. It worked great on launch day. Three weeks later I couldn't add a single feature without something else breaking. This wasn't a prompt quality problem. I was writing detailed prompts. I was being specific about what I wanted. The issue was something subtler, and once I understood it, I changed how I work completely. Here's what I figured out. The real problem isn't the AI. It's the handoff. When you work with Claude on a project, there's an invisible handoff happening at every step: you're transferring the responsibility for design decisions to the model, and the model is making those decisions based on what's locally coherent — not what's globally maintainable. Every session, Claude starts fresh. It doesn't know why your auth module was structured a certain way last Tuesday. It doesn't know that you made a specific tradeoff in your database layer because of a constraint you discovered three sessions ago.…