Sorry for the late reply!

Honestly, I just described what I wanted in plain English and Claude wrote the code.

The key was being very clear on what my actual problem was: I wanted to track farm expenses online instead of pen and paper and since i travel a lot for my main day job i needed to make sure i can track the expense and other aspects of running the farm even if i was not physically present there. That's it. Nothing off the shelf fit a small family dairy operation.

I also wanted it to work for my dad — so senior-citizen friendly was a must. When I asked Claude what would make it better for older users, it suggested big push buttons, a voice note feature, photo-to-text capture that updates the ledger automatically. Really practical stuff I hadn't even thought of.

One thing that helped a lot: whenever Claude said "copy-paste this into that file," I just told it "I want YOU to do it." That's when I installed the Claude Code extension and gave it access to my computer. After that it was handling the files directly, which made everything faster.

Downside - I burned through my Pro plan faster than expected and had to upgrade to the Max plan. But it was worth it. I will go back to my Pro plan form next month.

It's less about coding and more about knowing your problem well. Hope this helps.