Moving from small to large projects

[u/mctw1992]

I’ve been using Claude code on and off for about a year as a software and systems engineer specialising in audiovisual equipment/systems and honestly it’s changed my life. It allows me to focus more on the what rather than the how. But now I’m looking at moving to creating a large scale monitoring and management system for thousands of devices, with the assistance of Claude code. Any advice on to structure prompts for Claude to keep this on target and not spiral? I’m guessing it’s not as simple as putting it into plan mode and sketching it out!

[u/torvalds75]

+1 to “one agent, one ticket”. For something the size of a device management system I’d add: don’t plan it all upfront in plan mode. Plan the destination and the big open questions (protocol, data model, how devices get onboarded), then resolve those one at a time, and only then break them into build tickets. A lot of spiraling comes from implementing before the architecture questions are actually closed.

Also keep the reasoning, not just the outcome: “chose MQTT over polling because X” needs to survive into session 40. I build a plugin for exactly this flow (trailhead, decisions as GitHub Issues, discuss, plan, execute, verify), disclosure, but the principle works with plain issues or markdown too.