Planning the App

A great resource for this section is is Lesson 2 from MYOWA.  Below is a distillation with some AI tweaks.  Please refer to that course for more in depth!

• Scope of the Project — same as before: 2-3 sentences, what it is + why it matters. Pure human thinking, no AI angle needed.
• Solutions Overview — what tech – programming languages – techniques should I use.  What type of screen?  Responsive based on the size of the device.  DRY.  Makign sure code is reusable.  Use classes.  Or use functions.  Share CODE.  Especially CSS.
• Core Functionality — reframed as “Resolve Before You Prompt” — this is where AI changes the old lesson. Their original Core Functionality sections were full of open questions left for later (“Do you want this to rotate or just flip?” / “Does it generate multiple… like 3 to choose from?”) — fine when a human is coding it themselves, since you naturally resolve these as you go. An AI won’t pause to ask — it’ll just pick an answer, build it, and the wrong guess often doesn’t surface until it’s tangled up with three other features (exactly the Session 2 mess). Teach the rule: as many of these open questions as possible get an actual decision before Session 4, not left dangling.
• Wireframe — keep it lightweight, a quick sketch or plain-English description of the main screen(s). Bonus: it can be pasted almost directly into a Claude Code prompt as the UI description.

New AI-specific technique — “ask me first”: some questions genuinely can’t be resolved until you’re deep in building. For those, teach one specific prompt to hand Claude Code the leftover ambiguity instead of letting it guess silently:

“Here’s my spec. Before you build anything, ask me clarifying questions about anything that’s ambiguous or that you’d have to guess on.”