There's a pattern I've seen repeat across dozens of solo projects and small teams: Week 1: Claude generates something. It works. You're flying. Week 4: You need to add a feature. You open the codebase and feel faintly ill. You can't tell what's load-bearing and what's scaffolding. You try prompting Claude again. It makes things worse. This isn't a model problem. It's a workflow problem — and it happens so early you usually can't see it coming. What Actually Goes Wrong Most people assume the issue is prompt quality. If their Claude output is messy, they think: "I need better prompts." That's not quite right. Prompts are requests. What breaks things is the structure you give those requests — or the absence of one. Here's the specific failure mode I see most often: You ship Claude's first-pass output without establishing a coherent structure first. Claude is excellent at filling in a shape.…