I tell Claude Code to make a detailed implementation plan, then come back to me for discussion, then we step through the plan bit by bit together. It's all about guidelines. Don't want it to charge ahead? Tell it not to.
I had a very specific problem I wanted to solve, Opus kept being entirely sure that it knew what the problem was, and that it could fix it. Next iteration, when the previous solution didn't work, Claude was sure it was some other thing. So on and so forth, until I was $35 poorer and had a bunch of code that didn't really seem to do anything, and certainly not fix my problem.
