If you've ever typed "build me an e-commerce app" into an AI tool, you know how it goes. You get something that runs, but it's not what you pictured. The login works differently than you wanted, the checkout has steps you never asked for, and half the buttons look like they came from different apps.

The problem isn't the AI. It's that you left it hundreds of decisions to guess at.

What worked for me was changing the order of things. I stopped asking for code first. Instead I ask Claude to help me write five short documents, answer its questions, and only then hand everything to Claude Code to build. The code ends up being the easy part.

This post walks through the whole process with the exact prompts I use. The stack here is Angular on the front end and ASP.NET Core on the back end, but the method works with any stack. I'll use a made-up store called QuickCart as the example.…