Top Down vs Bottoms Up

I have observed many seasoned developers have struggled to experience the magic of Claude Code. As someone who is terminally on r/ClaudeAI subreddit this disparity in outcomes fills me with curiosity.

The Exploratory Mindset

One bit of advice I tend to give folks having a tough onboarding process is to try a Bottoms Up exploratory approach. Instead of requesting Claude to do a complex task which results in you and Claude being frustrated and flabbergasted due to:

Lack of sufficient context - Not enough information to work with
Context mismanagement - Poor organization of information flow
Context poisoning - Contaminated or misleading information
Bad adherence - Instructions not followed properly
Lack of specificity - Too much margin for error
Bad feedback loop - No clear success/failure signals

Building Competence Incrementally

It is better to start getting small wins with Claude and incrementally increasing the size of your wins until you run into the wall which is either your ability to provide Claude with the necessary context or an actual limitation of the model.

I have found that after you experiment enough you get a good idea of how small/big you can make a task and still get good performance. The advantage of this approach is that you can improve your context management skills as you learn how the tool works and then deconstruct complicated tasks into tasks which Claude can solve without Hail Mary-ing your way through.

Why Small Wins Compound

Even if a Top Down complexity approach can work, you're robbing yourself of the essential skill of deconstructing tasks and the pattern recognition for what a model like Claude 4 Sonnet is good at, plus learning which mechanics can be used in combination to make the model more performant, e.g. Plan Mode, ultrathink and sub-agents.

A Bottoms Up exploratory approach also helps you learn what Models (Sonnet or Opus) are necessary for different kinds of tasks and this knowledge will help you as you scale up to running sub-agents or role split sub-agents on various tasks.

The Inefficiency Trap

Being inefficient with Claude Code is extremely painful due to the best models not only being expensive but also incredibly parallelisable, so your inefficiency can scale in an instant.

It does make me chuckle people are so enamored by the most powerful model even if it can be slower or overkill for a scenario. This preference also prevents an individual from exploring creative performant solutions which work with the more cost effective models.

Learning Strategy

Bottom-up adoption creates a foundation of confidence and pattern recognition. Each small win and loss teaches you Claude's capabilities and limitations, building the expertise needed for complex tasks.