Right now I start chatting with a separate LLM about the issue, the best structure for maintainability and then best libraries for the job, edge and corner cases, how to handle those, and then have it spit out a prompt and a checklist. If it has a UI I'll draw something in paint and refine it before having the LLM describe it in detail and primary workflow etc. and tell it to format it for an agent to use. That will usually get me a functional system on the first try which can then be iterated on.

That's for complicated stuff. For throw-away stuff I don't need to maintain past 30 days like a script I'll just roll the dice and let it rip.

Yeah, this is a good idea. I will have a Claude chat session and a Claude Code session open side by side too.

Like a manual sub agents approach. I try not to pollute the Claude code session context with meanderings to much. Do that in the chat and bring the condensed ideas over.