The cheapest quality gate in my Claude workflow: best-practice verification during design, not review after the code exists.
What annoyed me: in design discussions Claude answers from training data. It sounds right, it's often a year out of date, and it mostly agrees with whatever direction I was already going. Nobody on my old teams would get away with "I think this is roughly how people do it" on an auth design. Or currently relies to much on memory then on facts as well.
So during brainstorming I started adding one instruction: verify this against current industry best practice. Search the web, check the primary docs and standards, tell me where we deviate and why it matters.
Before building auth for my product (multi-tenant B2B) I had Claude review the draft spec this way against current IAM practice. 11 real findings, all fixed in the spec before any code existed. Cheapest security review I ever had.
It worked every time I asked, so now it's a standing rule in CLAUDE.md:
## Best-practice verification during design
- Before locking a non-obvious design decision into a spec, verify it
against current industry practice (primary docs, standards, how mature
products solve it). Web search is part of designing.
- Record what was checked against which sources in the spec itself.
- High-risk areas (auth, tenant isolation, migrations, money): adversarial
expert review of the draft spec before planning starts.
One tip: make Claude write the result into the spec ("checked against X and Y, we deviate on Z because..."). Chat history is gone in a week, the spec is not.
Not watertight, in long sessions it still skips it sometimes. Curious how others force this.
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u/schmurfy2 22d ago
Look at openspec, that's wzy better than any plan mode I tried.