6 Planning and building in stages with BDD
This chapter covers
- Using plan mode so Claude writes plans rather than code
- Breaking down a large feature into multiple plans
- Building with behavior-driven development
- Focusing your acceptance reviews on test scenarios
- Working with subagents to run multiple tasks in parallel
- Asking Claude to write the prompt for a complex task
How do you feel about letting Claude Code run free and build an entire component with very little oversight? Your confidence comes from running tests, using the app, and layering on more quality gates until you’re satisfied. But there’s too much work to review it fully. Are you happy to be accountable for thousands of lines of code you haven’t read? For certain types of work, you should be. I let Claude build the auth service which was closely specced and aligned to published standards. I saved at least a week of project time and any issues would have been obvious.
Other types of work need a different approach, because you want to be closer to the decisions and have more frequent feedback opportunities. You don’t gain productivity having Claude write a week’s worth of code, if you throw it away because it solves the wrong problem. Claude Code supports a finer-grained approach with plan mode. It’s a normal session and you take turns in the conversation as usual, but instead of doing the work Claude plans it thoroughly and you iterate on the plan together before you tell Claude to go ahead and execute.