Turnips and Gherkins
This video shows my current process for enhancing an existing feature using Claude Code.
The key things to note:
- I spend a fair amount of time on the original prompt (when Claude is in plan mode) - telling it which files I think will be important
- Often during the planning stage, Claude will stop and ask me questions - however, this was a pretty simple change
- I spend a bit of time looking through the plan that it's come up with - in this case the plan was fine but other times I've given it feedback and told it to try again
- We clear the context before starting the work - giving the LLM the most context available for doing the actual coding
- Normally I'd do something else whilst waiting for Claude to do the work - but as I was recording I stayed there. Eventually I got bored and had a snack, thinking I'll cut out that bit of the video. But of course, Claude got stuck at that point - and I had to intervene and give it some information (telling it to use the
wait_untilhelper). So sorry for having me munch on an apple during the video. - After it was done, I used an extension[1] to Turnip (the Gherkin/RSpec feature runner I use) to generate screenshots of each step of the user story, so I could do a quick evaluation of the work that Claude had done. In this case it was pretty unnecessary, as it didn't really result in any UI changes, but in most features, it's the perfect way of checking what was built without spending ages going through it all manually.
Technically, this is "vibe-coding" - I'm not really looking at the code that Claude has produced, I'm just checking the outputs. But, I think you can see, that the way that I'm driving Claude isn't just "Build a to-do app that works like a Kanban board"[2]. It's not the same as delegating the work to another developer and then performing a code review; it's more of a gentle guiding hand, giving out technical advice when the developer takes a wrong turn.
