Before the first prompt: purpose, vision, and who this is for
The twenty minutes I spent on paper before opening Claude. Why they mattered more than any individual prompt.
The temptation is to just start.
Open Claude Code, type something like "build me a blog where I document making money with AI," and see what comes out. I almost did that. I had the terminal open, cursor in the prompt field.
I closed it.
I'd seen enough abandoned side projects — mine and other people's — to recognize the pattern. Vague intent produces vague output, and vague output produces the specific kind of frustration where you've spent three days building something that technically works but doesn't actually do what you wanted. The problem isn't the tool. It's that you never clearly said what you wanted.
So before the first prompt, I spent twenty minutes on paper answering three questions. Not in a document, not in a template — just a notebook. The answers were more specific than I expected. One of them surprised me enough that I rewrote it twice.
The rest is for supporters
Pay once, read everything — this post and whatever comes next.
What's inside
- →The three questions that shaped every design decision on this site
- →How writing a user profile changed what goes on the homepage
- →The CLAUDE.md file as a living vision document — what's in mine
- →The trick of asking Claude to argue against your own idea before you build it