I spent 80% of my time planning and 20% coding with AI tools | Hacker News Reader

I spent 80% of my time planning and 20% coding with AI tools

3 pointscgvas14 comments

Built three apps last month using AI coding tools. Two are profitable ($120 total revenue), one was just to test something.

I wanted to test the theory of dedicating 80% of my time to planning and creating structured docs

painpoint.space took 6 days total. I spent 5 days just... planning. Maybe 8 hours actually coding. Got my first $20/month customer about a week later.

I used to jump straight into Cursor and start asking it to build stuff. Waste hours explaining the same context over and over. Get frustrated when it forgets what we're building between sessions.

So before opening any IDE, I workshopped with Claude to create context documents on - What exactly the app does - Every single feature - How the database should work - Even custom rules for my AI assistant

Felt like procrastinating at first. But when I finally started coding, everything just... worked. The AI understood immediately. No confusion, no re-explaining.

To test this wasn't a fluke, I tried building legaldiff.com with just 7 prompts. Not 7 sessions, 7 total prompts from idea to working app. It worked because all the context was already there.

Results from three apps - painpoint.space: $40/month recurring (finds business ideas from Reddit) - renewpic.com: $130 made, 260+ users signed up - legaldiff.com: working MVP in 7 prompts

The pattern is consistent. More upfront planning = way less back-and-forth with AI.

My co-founder and I are now building this into a repeatable system (precursor.tools). Got 80 people on the waitlist just from talking about this approach.

Curious if others have stumbled into this. The better your planning, the less you actually need to "code" with these AI tools.

This reads like an ad

There is something creepily reminiscent to multi level marketing with posts that discuss how to build with ai and then push very narrow subscription based saas “products”. I.e you can get rich too (sadly though rich in this case is not enough to cover the llm subscription costs)

I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. I dont think it is enticing people to visit those sites but there is useful info here.

Yeah that was not my intent to try and promote the websites. It was more so to showcase my experience.

I can see that, I was more trying to tell my experience and story

Truly great marketing is just telling the truth.

No, truly great marketing is telling the truth to the correct audience, through the correct channel. Telling the wrong people in the wrong channels is simply called spam.

Same here. I broke down the work to build a mobile app into architecture patterns.

Each work segment was implementing this.

CC still fucks up on basic shit (I believe that sometimes it just refuses to read the CLAUDE.md which is fucking annoying) but I can usually get it back on track.

It's amazing isn't it? Claude Code will do amazing things, but stumble on the easiest things. "Change this border radius 2px" ... "Okay, heres a brand new custom component"

You’re not wrong. However, it is possible I could have wasted time doing something, inevitably. At least Claude Code closes that gap significantly which is ultimately a huge net positive for me. Even if it makes silly mistakes. I ask it to ensure it has read my CLAUDE.md and understood the project structure as the first prompt when I do a task. Almost never fails anymore. I also have a 950 line CLAUDE.md that describes the system architecture and maybe put like 4 hours of work into that prompt.

Maybe I’m not elite human capital you might say. I’m sure you’ve written perfect code and have a 100% sales rate. Kidding but I’m sure you get it.

At worst I get some time foe personal life. At best I will save a ton of time.

This is what product management is. Clarity. If you know what you're building, it's gonna get built. Don't want to get all Rick Rubin here.

Clarity and Context are key with maybe a sprinkle of Rick Rubin for creativity lol

How do you structure Claude context files/Claude.md?

For context docs I will have them organized in a docs folder. Then within either Claude Code I'll add those file references to the Claude.md or Cursor I will create a rule for those docs and tag it.

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