Planning vs Building Prompts

🎯 Two Types of Prompts

When you work with Claude Code, you're essentially writing two different kinds of prompts:

Building prompts tell Claude to do something. Planning prompts ask Claude to think first.

😬 The Vibe-Coding Trap

When you're excited to build something, it's tempting to jump straight to building prompts:

Claude will try. It might even produce something. But without planning, you're likely to hit problems:

• The structure doesn't make sense for what you actually need
• Features conflict with each other
• You end up rebuilding from scratch
• Fixes break other things

This is the "vibe-coding spiral"—you're always reacting to problems instead of preventing them.

🧭 The Planning Alternative

What if you started differently?

Now Claude is helping you think before it helps you build. The output isn't code—it's a plan.

📋 What Good Planning Looks Like

A planning conversation might produce:

• A feature list — What the app will actually do (and what it won't)
• A file structure — What files you'll need and how they connect
• A build order — What to create first, second, third
• Edge cases — Things that might go wrong and how to handle them
• A definition of "done" — How you'll know when it's working

You don't need all of these for every project. But having some plan is always better than having none.

✏️ Practice: Rewrite These Prompts

For each vibe-coding prompt below, try rewriting it as a planning prompt. Click to see a suggested answer.

🔄 When to Plan vs Build

💡 Your ID Advantage

Here's something you might recognize: planning prompts are basically analysis and design questions. As an instructional designer, you do this naturally:

• "What does the learner need to be able to do?" = "What features do I actually need?"
• "What's the learning path?" = "What's the build order?"
• "How will we assess success?" = "How will I know it's working?"

You've been doing planning work your whole career. Apply that same discipline here.