In my study days, we talked of “spikes”. Software or components which functionally addressed some need, but often was badly written and architected.
That’s what I think most resembles claude code output.
And I ask the llm to write todo-lists, break tasks into phases, maintain both larger docs on individual features and a highly condensed overview doc. I also have written claude code like tools myself, run local LLMs and so on. That is to say, I may still be “doing it wrong”, but I’m not entirely clueless .
The only place where claude code has nearly done the whole thing and largely left me with workable code was some react front-end work I did (and no, it wasn’t great either, just fair enough).