Stop vibe coding. Apply the research-plan-implement workflow that prevents runaway Claude Code sessions and ships output you can trust.
Hand an AI coding assistant a vague request and let it improvise, and you get scope creep, silent wrong turns, and sessions that spiral until you can no longer tell what changed or why.
You finished a feature on Friday. On Monday you open the same project to change one thing — and you genuinely don't remember what the assistant touched, why it touched it, or whether the tests that pass are testing the right behavior.
You type, "the dashboard is slow, can you make it faster?" and the assistant starts moving — adding a caching layer, rewriting a database query, pulling in a new lazy-loading library, and changing how three components fetch their data.
You hand the assistant a task: "Add pagination to the results list." Some of what it produces might even work.
Once the assistant starts editing files, within minutes you face a choice you may not notice you're making: read every change as it lands, or scroll past and trust that the plan is holding.
A plan answers a different question: what are we about to change, and how will I know it worked? Skipping straight from that question to actual edits is where most beginners lose control.
Take a real task you'd otherwise hand over in one line — "add a search box," "clean up this messy file," "set up tests for this module." Before opening your assistant, write three short bullets, starting with Research: what would I want the assistant to find out first?
It's tempting to think one very detailed prompt could get the same result — explain the task, the constraints, and the standards all at once, and let the assistant handle everything. That instinct is reasonable, and it fails for a specific reason.
Suppose the task is "let users export their reports as PDF." Run as one prompt, the assistant picks a PDF library, decides where the export button goes, invents a file-naming scheme, and wires it all up.
The Plan-First Protocol breaks one large request into three separate phases, each with a different job and a clear stopping point. Research: the assistant reads and reports — no code, no changes, just an account of what exists and what the task involves. Plan: the assistant proposes.
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