When one prompt isn't enough

Since your first edit, the rhythm has been simple: ask, Claude does, you check. That works beautifully — right up until the task gets big. Then the same one-shot habit quietly becomes the thing that wrecks your afternoon.

A task is “big” when you can’t say, in one sentence, exactly what done looks like — because there are decisions to make and things nobody knows yet.

Notice what that definition is not about. It’s not about lines of code. A one-character change can be enormous; a 200-line change can be trivial. Size lives in the decisions and the unknowns, not the diff.

The four signals

You’re looking at a big task if any of these are true:

• It spans multiple files. Touching one file is usually one idea. Touching six means six places to get something subtly wrong.
• It has real decisions in it. “Which library?” “Where should this live?” “What happens to people who already signed up?” If you’d have to stop and choose, so will Claude — and it’ll choose for you if you let it.
• It has unknowns. Things neither of you can predict until you look. “I think there’s auth code somewhere but I’m not sure how it works.”
• You can’t describe done in one sentence. If the finish line is fuzzy to you, it’s fuzzier to Claude.

One signal is a yellow light. Two or more is a red one.

Small vs. big, side by side

“Rename getUser to getCurrentUser” — one file, one decision (already made), zero unknowns, crystal-clear finish. Small. Just ask.

“Add support for signing in with Google” — which library? where does the session live? what about existing accounts? how does the button look? Big. Four decisions before a single line gets written.

Here’s the part that trips people up: the big task often sounds shorter. “Add Google login” is three words. “Rename this one variable across the file” is eight. The word count is a liar. Counting the hidden decisions is what tells you the truth.

The move

When you spot a big task, your next message to Claude is not the work. Asking a big task cold is like telling a contractor “build me a kitchen” and leaving for the weekend. You’ll come back to a kitchen — just probably not yours.

The next move is to slow down and get aligned before anything changes. That’s the whole rest of this level. The first tool for it is up next.

What’s next

You can spot a big task now. The next lesson is what to do the instant you do: switch Claude into a mode that thinks and proposes but doesn’t touch anything yet — so you can disagree while it’s still free.