Most developers are about to become obsolete. Here's how to survive the AI transition.
10 Claude Code patterns that separate builders who ship from builders who struggle
Vibe Coding makes founders, product managers and designers 10x more powerful… those who don’t learn how to build products with AI will be left behind.
Meet, Eyad Khrais, who is definitely not going to be one of them.
Eyad shipped code to millions of users at Amazon, Disney and Capital One. He’s now CTO of a startup building enterprise agents, and Claude Code is his daily driver. Claude Code, is the one tool you need to learn if you want to survive the AI transition. Not ChatGPT, not Gemini. Claude Code.
Yesterday Eyad dropped a complete tutorial that crystallized patterns I’d been finding my way toward for the last few months, building Pravos, Vibrana, Saraven, and just shipped three products at a Series A insurtech in two weeks that would’ve taken a normal team months.
Here are the 10 patterns that actually matter, distilled from Eyad’s experience and my own building. If you’re using Claude Code—or thinking about it—these will save you hours of fighting the tool.
1. Plan First, Build Second
The biggest mistake people make? Opening Claude Code and immediately starting to type.
The fix: Hit Shift + Tab twice to enter Planning mode. Do this before every feature, every refactor, every significant change.
Planning mode produces dramatically better results 10 out of 10 times. Not occasionally. Every single time.
Before you ask Claude to build a feature, think about the architecture. Before you ask it to refactor, think about the end state. Before you ask it to debug, think about what you actually know about the problem.
For non-engineers: Have a deep back-and-forth with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude first. Describe what you want to build. Ask for different system design options. Ask each other questions. Settle on a solution together. Then bring that clarity to Claude Code.
Plan mode takes 5 minutes. It saves hours of debugging later.
2. Architecture is everything—be specific or pay the price
Architecture is like giving someone the output and nothing more. This leaves massive wiggle room in how to get there—which is exactly the problem with AI-generated code.
Bad prompt: “Build me an auth system”
Good prompt: “Build email/password authentication using the existing User model, store sessions in Redis with 24-hour expiry, and add middleware that protects all routes under /api/protected.”
You can see the difference, but you might not know what good architecture looks like. So take the time to PLAN and have a conversation about each element of teh stack.
3. Your CLAUDE.md file is your leverage point
CLAUDE.md is a markdown file that Claude reads before every conversation. It’s onboarding material that shapes how Claude approaches your project.
Most people either ignore it completely or stuff it with garbage that makes Claude worse.
Here’s what actually matters:
Keep it short. Claude can only reliably follow 150-200 instructions at a time, and Claude Code’s system prompt already uses about 50. Every instruction you add competes for attention. If your CLAUDE.md is a novel, Claude will start ignoring things randomly.
Make it specific to your project. Don’t explain what a components folder is. Claude knows. Tell it the weird stuff—the bash commands that matter, naming conventions you care about, gotchas that bit you before.
Tell it why, not just what. “Use TypeScript strict mode” is okay. “Use TypeScript strict mode because we’ve had production bugs from implicit any types” is better. The why gives Claude context for judgment calls you didn’t anticipate.
Update it constantly. Press the # key while working and Claude will auto-add instructions to your CLAUDE.md. Every time you correct Claude on the same thing twice, that’s a signal it belongs in the file.
Bad CLAUDE.md looks like documentation for a new hire. Good CLAUDE.md looks like notes you’d leave yourself if you knew you’d have amnesia tomorrow.
4. Context degrades at 30%, not 100%
Opus 4.5 has a 200,000 token context window. But the model starts to deteriorate way before you hit capacity.
At around 20-40% context usage, output quality starts degrading. If you’ve ever experienced Claude Code compacting and then still giving terrible output, that’s why. The model was already degraded before compaction happened.
Every message, every file Claude reads, every piece of generated code—all of it accumulates. Once quality starts dropping, more context makes it worse, not better.
The mental model: Claude is stateless. Every conversation starts from nothing except what you explicitly give it.
5. Scope your conversations (one task per chat)
One conversation per feature or task. Don’t use the same conversation to build your auth system and then refactor your database layer. The contexts will bleed together and Claude will get confused.
The copy-paste reset trick: When context gets bloated, copy everything important from the terminal, run /compact to get a summary, /clear the context entirely, paste back only what matters. Fresh context with critical information preserved.
Way better than letting Claude struggle through degraded context.
6. Use external memory (SCRATCHPAD.md is your friend)
Working on something complex? Have Claude write plans and progress to actual files. I use SCRATCHPAD.md or plan.md.
These persist across sessions. When you come back tomorrow, Claude can read the file and pick up where you left off instead of starting from zero.
Know when to clear. If a conversation has gone off the rails or accumulated irrelevant context, just /clear and start fresh. Claude will still have your CLAUDE.md, so you’re not losing project context.
7. Bad input equals bad output—always
People blame the model when they get bad results. “Claude isn’t smart enough” or “I need a better model.”
Reality check from Eyad: If you’re getting bad output with a good model like Opus 4.5, your input and prompting need work. Full stop.
Model quality is table stakes. The bottleneck is almost always on the human side—how you structure prompts, how you provide context, how clearly you communicate what you actually want.
Be specific about what you want. “Build an auth system” gives Claude creative freedom it will use poorly. Give it constraints, examples, clear boundaries.
Tell it what NOT to do. Claude 4.5 in particular likes to overengineer—extra files, unnecessary abstractions, flexibility you didn’t ask for. If you want something minimal: “Keep this simple. Don’t add abstractions I didn’t ask for. One file if possible.”
Give it context about why. “We need this to be fast because it runs on every request” changes how Claude approaches the problem. “This is a prototype we’ll throw away” changes what tradeoffs make sense.
8. Know when to use Sonnet vs Opus
Sonnet is faster and cheaper. Excellent for execution tasks where the path is clear—writing boilerplate, refactoring based on a specific plan, implementing features where you’ve already made architectural decisions.
Opus is slower and more expensive. Better for complex reasoning, planning, and tasks where you need Claude to think deeply about tradeoffs.
The workflow that works: Use Opus to plan and make architectural decisions, then switch to Sonnet (Shift+Tab in Claude Code) for implementation. Your CLAUDE.md ensures both models operate under the same constraints, so the handoff is clean.
9. When Claude gets stuck, change the approach (don’t loop)
Sometimes Claude just loops. Tries the same thing, fails, tries again, fails, keeps going. Or it confidently implements something completely wrong.
The instinct is to keep pushing. More instructions. More corrections. More context.
Better move: Change the approach entirely.
Clear the conversation. /clear gives you a fresh start. Accumulated context might be confusing it.
Simplify the task. If Claude is struggling with a complex task, break it into smaller pieces. Get each piece working before combining them. But in reality, if Claude is struggling, your plan mode was probably insufficient.
Show instead of tell. If Claude keeps misunderstanding, write a minimal example yourself. “Here’s what the output should look like. Now apply this pattern to the rest.” Claude is extremely good at pattern matching.
The meta-skill: Recognizing when you’re in a loop early. If you’ve explained the same thing three times and Claude still isn’t getting it, more explaining won’t help. Change something.
10. Build systems, not one-shots (use headless mode)
The people who get the most value from Claude aren’t using it for one-off tasks. They’re building systems where Claude is a component.
Claude Code has a -p flag for headless mode. It runs your prompt and outputs the result without entering the interactive interface. This means you can script it. Pipe output to other tools. Chain it with bash commands. Integrate it into automated workflows.
Enterprises are using this for automatic PR reviews, automatic support ticket responses, automatic logging and documentation updates. All logged, auditable, improving over time based on what works.
The flywheel: Claude makes a mistake, you review the logs, you improve the CLAUDE.md or tooling, Claude gets better next time. This compounds.
If you’re only using Claude interactively, you’re leaving value on the table. Think about where in your workflow Claude could run without you watching.
This is what I’m teaching in the Vibrana vibe coding bootcamps. Not just how to use the tools, but how to think with them to build for lasting impact. How to structure your work so the AI amplifies your judgment instead of replacing it.
Because that’s what this is really about: learning to build the way these tools actually work, instead of fighting them to work the way you’re used to.
It’s a complete paradigm shift.
Full credit to Eyad Khrais for the original tutorial on X—his patterns are gold. I’ve adapted them here through the lens of my own building experience. If you’re building with Claude Code and want more tactical breakdowns, subscribe to follow along. Peace ✌️