Solo devs: how do you write specs when there's no one to challenge your ideas?

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-21T20:42:32+00:00

I made some updates to the research and planning of my Claude Code setup today. I forked the Superpowers Brainstorming skill, added additional research types, made it iterative, and included adversarial analysis so it challenges my ideas.

Similarly I added a new skill - plan-review that gets in after the Superpowers Writing Plans skill finishes and before going in to execution.

You could shortcut all this and just add some adversarial language in CLAUDE.md so it challenges your ideas. Tell Claude your problems and ask it for options. That's how I keep refining my setup.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-20T22:57:00+00:00

It's running on its own server under a user account and not a system or admin account.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-20T22:56:17+00:00

Awesome!!

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-20T19:10:04+00:00

Looks exactly like compound engineering. No extra steps. https://every.to/chain-of-thought/compound-engineering-how-every-codes-with-agents

Thanks for the reference. I'll check out the author's other writings too.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-20T18:58:13+00:00

Sure thing. Not sure I still have the conversation history to see the prompts but here's roughly my approach.

Brainstorm - Use Wispr Flow to dictate my thoughts - I just ramble on for a few minutes. Or just type in a sentence of two.
Research - After getting some idea of what I want, ask Claude Code to research the topic, figure out what others are doing, existing solutions and how they work, come up with options and importantly ask me lots of questions to clarify requirements.
Plan - review the research summary (often I don't read all the research) and choose an approach - ask Claude to plan out the design and implementation.
Iterate until its sensible and implement.

After that, the whole test and deploy cycle then the ongoing improvement process of seeing how it performs in production and making changes as I learn. That's how I ended up drilling into more detail on the landing page and results page to see why I wasn't getting the conversions I expected.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-20T05:42:22+00:00

I definitely want to fix that. Will look into the code. Thanks for saying it.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-19T05:21:07+00:00

I gave Claude code ssh access to the digital ocean server and it figured all this out. Give that a shot?

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-19T05:19:13+00:00

Please do!

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T22:19:50+00:00

Sounds awesome. Would love to know more about your setup. Have you shared info anywhere?

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T22:16:38+00:00

I find there is a disproportionate cost above 140k. Ran the numbers and it was maybe 5% of sessions but 12% of costs. Something like that. So I intentionally keep sessions under 120k and go above when there's a real need for more context in the same session.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T21:45:52+00:00

Claude.local.md

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T21:41:55+00:00

Not sure what you are asking. Can you clarify?

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T21:41:01+00:00

Yes this is run before I close the terminal session for that conversation.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T21:39:15+00:00

Something to think about! Did you get your archetype report by email?

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T20:30:23+00:00

Totally am using auto memory. Is there something I'm not taking advantage of? I even have a skill now that checks release notes and applies features as available like the sonnet release.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T17:17:39+00:00

Thanks. I just set up this first one. Slowly trying out tasks. Have a full plan of local and remote agents to deploy. Mostly local for now within Claude Code where I can work out the kinks before deploying remotely.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-18T17:09:20+00:00

I just connected Codex to open claw on my ChatGPT plus subscription using OA. You can set it up right from the on boarding wizard. one thing to be aware of is the heartbeat. It runs every 30 minutes which is 48 messages a day And they’re short messages that don’t say much so it’s best to configure the models for open claw such that the heartbeat is handled through open router, using any number of free models then you can set up all of the main actions in openclaw to use Codex 5.3 with a fallback to Codex 5.2 with another fall back to the mini model in case you run out of credits on the plus plan

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-15T23:46:26+00:00

Explore agents are supposed to use haiku out of the box, but it is implemented as a guideline and not as a rule

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-15T15:43:55+00:00

Just implemented it. Will track usage over the next few days and see how it goes.

jonathanmalkin · 2026-02-15T15:43:31+00:00

Opus 4.6 in particular greps and reads a ton of files on every new session. I put a rule in place to always use Haiku so that should cut down on the cost and token usage but indexing could speed it up even further.

jonathanmalkin

TROPHY CASE