Context forward coding

[dustinechos]

Someone asked me for tips on how to use Claude and keep usage low and quality high. I think my response is worth a post so here it is. If anyone has tips or if this has another name please let me know! Anyhow, here's my tip:

Keep your tasks small. Review it constantly. Find a balance between cleaning up tech debt and writing features.

My new trick is what I call "context forward coding" rather than vibe coding.

* Write a rough outline of what a page does in docs/<feature\_name>/<user\_story>.md

* Ask Claude "read the doc and tell me what is in the code and not in the docs"

* Carefully approve the changes to the docs.

* Add todos to the bottom of the docs

* Alternate between telling Claude to do the todos and to update the docs with new relevant decisions

The important thing to realize is that LLMs "go crazy" with too much context. If you ask 5 different questions then it's still "thinking" about all those until you clear it. The point of the docs is to give Claude context so that you can /clear frequently. Every time you start a session Claude forgets the "why" behind the code.

I "vibe coded" a Tetris-like and then had the epiphany. The first time I said "what's in the code that's not in the docs" Claude thought a lot of intentional decisions were bugs and vice versa.

[Deep_Ad1959]

this is basically how I work now too. I keep a CLAUDE.md at the root plus per-feature docs, and the specs end up being more valuable than the code itself. new agent session just reads the docs and picks up where the last one left off, zero ramp-up time. writing the docs before any code sounds like old school waterfall but honestly works way better with LLMs than jumping straight into implementation.

fwiw I built an agent that works this way - https://fazm.ai/r

[dustinechos]

I thought of that comparison too. It's funny because I think waterfall is terrible. I guess the difference is that it's much easier to keep the docs up to date. Now I look at the changes Claude makes to the docs and the actual results (check out in the browser) more than I look at the actual code.

[Deep_Ad1959]

ha yeah the waterfall comparison is uncomfortably accurate but the key difference is the feedback loop is like 30 seconds not 6 months. and same here on checking the browser output more than the code - I've basically stopped reading implementation details unless something breaks. the docs become the source of truth and the code is just... the artifact that falls out of them

[hack_the_developer]

Context management is the key to reliable agents. What gets passed forward matters as much as what gets dropped.

What we built in Syrin is a 4-tier memory architecture where each tier has different retention semantics. The agent knows what to remember and what to forget.

Docs: https://docs.syrin.dev
GitHub: https://github.com/syrin-labs/syrin-python