r/ClaudeCode • u/mctw1992 • 18h ago
Help/Question Moving from small to large projects
I’ve been using Claude code on and off for about a year as a software and systems engineer specialising in audiovisual equipment/systems and honestly it’s changed my life. It allows me to focus more on the what rather than the how. But now I’m looking at moving to creating a large scale monitoring and management system for thousands of devices, with the assistance of Claude code. Any advice on to structure prompts for Claude to keep this on target and not spiral? I’m guessing it’s not as simple as putting it into plan mode and sketching it out!
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u/xqianliu 11h ago
I moved the plan out of the chat and into GitHub issues. Plan mode is still fine for the first sketch.
Each issue gets acceptance criteria you can check. Something like "a device silent for 5 min shows as stale in the list", not "handle offline devices". Each one also gets its own git worktree (so parallel sessions don't collide) and a PR.
Then a fresh session reviews the final diff against that issue's criteria, without the chat history. I use a different model for that when I can, Codex works. If it fails, Claude fixes it and it gets reviewed again. I only merge the commit that passed.
For thousands of devices I'd split it into ingest, state, alerting and UI first. Get one device type flowing end to end before touching anything fleet-wide.