Why I plan every build twice

I plan every build twice. Two separate layers of planning before the real coding starts.

That's unusual. Most people plan once, then build. Or they lean on Claude's plan mode and figure the planning is handled. I run two layers, every time, on purpose.

Two layers: a macro plan and a micro plan.

The macro plan is mine

The macro plan is the product vision. What I'm building, and why. The decisions about what this thing is.

That plan is mine. Nobody else can make it. It's the source of truth everything else gets built against. I keep it in a PRD, but the format matters less than the job: it's me deciding what to build before anyone writes code.

And most of my time as a builder goes here. Not in the coding. Not in directing the coding, or reviewing it. It goes into shaping the what: the product vision, the granular requirements, the data modeling, the logic flows, the UI and UX. That's my role now, and it's where most of my hours go.

The micro plan is Claude's

The micro plan is plan mode. It's Claude's plan for how to build what the macro plan asks for.

Once Claude knows what I want, it still has to work out the build: which files, what approach, the technical steps. That's not my job. That's Claude thinking through the how before it touches a line of code.

My job there is to read that plan and approve it, not to write it. And because the vision above it is already shaped, what Claude proposes rarely surprises me. I approve, it builds.

So the two stop looking like planning the same thing twice. They're two different layers. I plan the what. Claude plans the how.

Why plan mode alone isn't enough

You can skip the macro plan and just use plan mode. A lot of people do. Claude will happily plan how to build something, then build it.

But plan mode on its own is Claude planning the how for a what you never pinned down. A sharp plan for a fuzzy target. The micro plan is only as good as the macro plan above it.

That's the whole reason I plan twice. The macro plan decides what to build. The micro plan figures out how. And plan mode is far more reliable, and stays on-task far longer, when it's working from a vision you actually shaped instead of guessing at one.

Plan mode per milestone

In practice, the micro plan runs per milestone. You don't plan the whole build in one shot. You plan one chunk at a time.

For each milestone:

1. Claude reads the macro plan, the PRD.
2. It focuses only on this one milestone, nothing else.
3. It plans, builds, then writes and reads a milestone-log to track where things stand.

If you use the PRD Creator skill, it auto-generates those per-milestone prompts for you, so each chunk gets its own micro plan without you writing one by hand every time.

Two layers, two jobs

So that's why I plan builds twice. The macro plan is mine: the what, the vision, where most of my time goes. The micro plan is Claude's: the how, the code.

Plan once and you're either skipping the vision or skipping the build plan. Plan both, and Claude stays on-task far longer.

Plan twice.