Claude Tidied a Codebase I Was Afraid to Touch

I used Claude the way most people first try it - slowly, and with a lot of backtracking.

A small habit change made the output usable instead of embarrassing.

Step one is the boring part people skip: name the one decision you're actually trying to make.

Then let Claude do the draft, but watch caps out on very long coding sessions.

The fix that mattered: feed it one example of the voice you want and hold it to that

What changed: writes the cleanest long-form prose of the bunch Now it's a ten-minute job I don't dread.

Don't expect it to be fire-and-forget. The tool handles the volume; you handle the judgment. That split is the whole trick.