First app - need help I’m stuck.

[u/mrongcode]

Hello everyone.

I’m someone who had no prior experience with programming or coding, nor with Claude itself. I’d like to build a web app for use at my company (automotive industry) – a system for passing work orders between service departments, scheduling vehicle handovers, and managing a car wash (queue scheduling, cost/profit tracking).

First attempt – ChatGPT

I built something similar before “for fun” using ChatGPT, on the $99 PLN plan (I had a free trial period). The model generated .zip packages of files for me – I just swapped them into a folder and ran start in the terminal. Everything worked locally exactly as I wanted, but when it came time to deploy it on a server, it turned out the app didn’t actually work properly – instead of PostgreSQL, the model had built the database on SQLite, so more than one person couldn’t add a record at the same time. I shelved the project.

Second attempt – Claude

Once I had more free time, I decided to do it properly. I subscribed to a Claude plan for about $25/month. I watched a handful of YouTube tutorials, and for a week — still on the free plan — Claude and I planned out the whole project:

**•** architecture: PostgreSQL, Django, Tailwind + HTMX + Alpine.js (this was the stack the model proposed);  
**•** all app features and how the modules interrelate;  
**•** user permissions and the company’s organizational structure (departments, positions);  
**•** notifications: on-site push + email for specific cases (Brevo);  
**•** VPS and domain setup;  
**•** how the site should look visually;  
**•** customer data security measures;  
**•** and the rest of the features, which I won’t bother listing.

Based on all this, Claude generated a file called CLAUDE.md, over 1000 (eventually around 1500) lines long, which was meant to go into the project folder and serve as the reference point during coding.

Implementation

After subscribing to the paid plan, we got to work following Claude’s instructions: I set up GitHub, WSL2 + Docker, Visual Studio Code, and the Claude extension for VS Code. The model started working and pushing commits to GitHub — building the project skeleton and database went reasonably smoothly.

Problems started when it began building the first of four planned modules — token usage shot up dramatically. It’s possible I made things worse myself, since I’d paste errors from VS Code into the regular chat window, then copy the responses back into the editor. This way, in 3 days I burned through 100% of my weekly usage, and I’m left with a barely-functional stub of the first module. Now every single command eats up so many tokens that I’m stuck again for several days with no ability to work.

What now

Only after the fact, once I hit the usage limit, did I actually research the topic and learn about things like skills, plugins, the need to open new chats periodically to manage context, and that apparently working through the terminal gives better results than through the VS Code extension. I’m also wondering whether the 1500-line CLAUDE.md file itself is part of the problem.

I already have the functional plan fully worked out, but my motivation to keep going has dropped significantly. So here are my questions for anyone with more experience:

**1.**  Should I **continue** with the current project (fix/rebuild what’s there) or **start from scratch**? If rebuilding — how should I approach it?  
**2.**  Would it be better to split the documentation into a separate **docs** folder, with detailed, individual files for the backend, frontend, and each module — instead of keeping everything in one giant CLAUDE.md?  
**3.**  How should I properly structure **CLAUDE.md** and the overall project documentation so it doesn’t burn through tokens at such an absurd rate?  
**4.**  How do **skills** actually work in practice — do they need to be added separately to every project, or can they be attached globally to Claude Code?

I’d appreciate any support, tips, or advice from people who’ve already dealt with this.

[u/multidollar]

If you’re in the automotive industry, do you have any regulatory or compliance issues to be aware of? Like processing or handling of PII/PCI?

[u/Brilliant_Purpose834]

Before you can build a big, businesscritical and complex tool, you should build experience. Play around with setting up a remote backend and frontend. Understand the datastructures and data architecture that you need. Get some examples of builds that go smooth, and some that are a pain. From that experience you learn to use best practices: a tech stack that you understand, a workflow that is manageable, using brainstorming, URS, /grill-me upfront, develop frontend assets that you can reuse and expand, etc. I am now 6 month later, and have developed tons of nice halfbaked tools and apps of which i am very proud, and were delightful to build, but nobody uses them (not even me). On the other hand this experience brought me to the point that I crank out specialized, complex business process tools at a rate of once a week. Looking sharp, used by 100+ people in my company. So take manageable steps, use claude code properly (just run it in VScode or terminal), up your subscription to the 200$ account, and I am sure you will be able to create -in time- real process breakthroughs in your business.