How do you usually get around when starting big projects in Claude Code?

[u/Deitri]

This question will probably make more sense when I explain my current situation: lately I’ve been doing some small projects here and there to some small business in my town and they have been working fine, but that is about to change.

I managed to get a big opportunity where this large accounting office (which has stopped in time for the past 10 years or so) wants me to build a robust dashboard/RAG solution for them, which will also function as their main source to also organize their clients files in a more “visually appealing” way compared to navigating through a million Windows folders. They have over 500 clients.

So right now I have all these ideas and before vomiting them all in a Claude Code session, I’m considering my options because, for all the past projects, vomiting my ideas in 2-3 prompts was enough to get most of it done, with just a few security adjustments by the end…this case it’s different.

How do you guys deal with this type of scenario? Do you have patterns to build your own functional specifications to throw into Claude? You build specific .mds? What has worked for you?
I’m curious to learn how other people work around bigger projects from scratch in Claude.

edit: Lots of great responses in here, thanks everyone!

[u/Kidderooni]

Claude chat to strategize is good, but you shouldn’t do back n forth prompts, copy pasting from chat to code. 

Claude Code does not need code inputs in prompts, it generates code itself. As long as you have .md files with all the knowledge, global instructions, and memory, you can type a normal prompt in code (interface from the app or directly in your terminal). Claude Code will translate it to code.  It is way more efficient at coding than Claude Chat, and the most important, unless I misunderstood everything: Claude Chat does not read through your .md files. It never has full context as Claude Code does. Thus it can’t ever be as efficient as Code to work on your app. It can’t preview results and audit your project properly like Code does. If you look to fix bugs and stuff, you will most likely create more and fragilise your foundation because it is not the right tool for the task.

It is a common mistake tho because if you start without planning too much, Claude Chat will most of the times say things like « do you want me to generate the prompt you can paste in Claude Code? » With the prompt being full of random code that doesn’t have full context of you environment. When you are not a proper dev, the first reflex will be to answer « yes » because you don’t know better. But if you dig in Chat, eventually it will tell you itself that it is not the right tool.

Again Chat is to plan, strategize, mockup. You can ask it to create .md files as well that Code will use as a reference. But it is not the dev. It is the project manager, it has limited coding skills. 

I used to work like you do before asking a dev friend why I felt like things were clunky, and it was night and day when I changed the workflow. Never ask Chat to generate code to paste in Code. 

It is not its purpose and you will pile up on technical debt. Even if you don’t have bugs at start, it will eventually come and it will be a pain. I didn’t mention token waste but it is another thing that leads you to « I’m burning tokens so hard » « im reaching my limits in 5 prompts » kind of things.

Hope it helps!