Changing Your Mind Has a Price
Changing your mind is normal. Everyone does it. But when you change your mind makes a huge difference.
Imagine you decide: “Actually, the gallery should be on the home page, not its own page.”
Watch what that same change costs at three different moments:
- In the plan, it’s one crossed-out line. A minute.
- Half built, things have to be moved around and reconnected.
- Finished, it touches the menu, the links, the layouts, how it looks on phones… everything that was built around the old decision.
The same change costs a minute in the plan and a day at the end.
“But Claude Is Fast”
Yes! Claude builds quickly. So you might think changes don’t matter much.
But here’s the catch: Claude builds a bad plan just as fast as a good one.
- Every late change risks breaking things that already worked.
- Big rebuilds in the middle of a project are where messy, confusing code comes from.
- Messy code makes every future change harder, for Claude too.
Speed doesn’t make planning less important. It makes it more important, because you can build the wrong thing in minutes.
Where Your Time Should Go
Most beginners do it backwards:
| Beginner | Done right | |
|---|---|---|
| Describing and planning | Two minutes | As long as it takes |
| Building | Hours of “no, not like that” | Smooth, step by step |
| Fixing and redoing | Lots | Little |
| Result | Generic, patched together | Clean, and yours |
It feels slower to plan. It isn’t. You just move the thinking to the moment when it’s cheapest.
Plan until it feels boring. Then plan a little more.
What “Deciding Early” Looks Like
Before any code gets written, you want answers to questions like:
- Who is this site for?
- How many pages, and what’s on each?
- What should it feel like?
- What must it have, and what can wait?
You don’t need to answer them alone. In the next note, you’ll learn how to work them out together with Claude, who’s surprisingly good at asking the right questions.