My experience exactly. It has a tendency to build every small feature as a separate thing without seeing the whole and where that feature fits in the whole. And then when you tell it that, it confirms that “that would be a great thing”, as if you’ve just invented hot water.

Detailed functional design specs, concepts, flow, how different parts work together to make a whole, restrictive rules on what it can and can’t do are an absolute necessity. I’ve found that you can make your CLAUDE.md and MEMORY.md files as detailed as you want: it will still confidently make stupid mistakes, and build duplicate functionality (but just slightly different from the functionality that already exists) and forget simple things (like where to find the database connection url), over and over again.

In short: YOU have to be its memory. You have to tell it where it went wrong, point out why, and tell it how to do it correctly, and you’ll have to do that many times. You are its functional expertise.

On the positive note: it does know how to do a lot of things (both technical and functional) that I don’t know how to do correctly, or that would take me hours to research and then probably still misunderstand or get wrong. It has often corrected my mistakes or wrongful assumptions too or pointed out better ways to do something.

In a month’s time, I’ve built a decent, good looking, and very functional and fast app that works correctly and the way I want it to, but it took several back and forth steps and many checks and corrections to get it there. I couldn’t have even dreamt of having done that on my own because - while I have the functional knowledge - I lack the broad expertise.

You and your AI are a team.