I had everything ready before I wrote a single line of code. Detailed prompts. System design notes. Tech stack decisions. Workflow docs. Days of prep so that when I finally sat down to build, nothing would slow me down. Then I started building. Almost all of it fell apart. Day 1 — The Plan Collapsed The prompts I'd crafted didn't produce what I expected. Outputs were inconsistent. I spent hours refining — restructuring, rewording, testing, getting slightly better results, then slightly worse ones. Then it hit me: I wasn't building. I was still preparing — just in a different form. So I made the only call that actually moved things forward: stop chasing the perfect setup. Build something functional instead. Obvious in hindsight. Not obvious at hour four of testing prompts that were close but never quite right. Day 2 — The Day It Actually Worked Instead of jumping into code, I used AI as a thinking partner first — filling gaps, stress-testing my understanding. Not generating outputs.…