Vibe Coding
I guess my first project was "vibe coding." I had good specs going in, but I ended up spending way more time making fine-tuned adjustments after the initial sprint than I did on the sprint itself. If you're watching YouTube guides or reading beginner-oriented Claude Code content, they do tend to highlight the importance of a good spec. But then after that they mostly just try to one-shot the project. I wanted something more structured for my next project, which is probably 20x more ambitious than my first. I did some research into Ralph Wiggum loops but they seem like a waste of tokens and just another fancy way of one-shotting it.
GSD
I found a Claude Code plugin called GSD (Get Shit Done) which is super up my alley. It's a structured planning system that sits on top of Claude Code. You define your project vision and requirements upfront, then break the work into phases. Each phase gets its own research, planning, and execution cycle. There are specialized sub-agents for different tasks: one for planning, one for executing, one for verifying that what was built actually matches the spec. I'm spending hours up front collaborating with Claude on the roadmap and specs before we've written any code. As a product manager, it feels like sitting with another PM and a senior engineer who are poking holes in the plan and working with you on solutions. Had I just run my spec as-is I'm sure Claude would have built what it wanted without consulting me first. Anyway, super cool stuff. Hope to have this project done by next weekend.