Claude Code Workflow Builder

A workflow beats a wall of prompts

The difference between people who get great results from Claude Code and people who get frustrated is rarely the model - it is the workflow. A one-shot 'build me the whole feature' prompt leaves the model guessing about your intent, your conventions, and your definition of done. A staged workflow - explore, plan, implement, verify, review, commit - keeps the model on rails and gives you checkpoints to catch a wrong turn before it costs you an hour. This builder assembles that staged workflow from your task type, with a copyable prompt for each step.

Everything is generated in your browser. Pick your task, toggle the steps you want, and copy the whole sequence. There is no network call and nothing is stored.

The five phases of a good Claude Code session

1. Explore - let the model read the relevant code and report what it found before it changes anything. This grounds every later step in reality.
2. Plan - have it write a short plan and wait for your approval. A 200-token plan that catches a wrong direction is far cheaper than a 5,000-token implementation going the wrong way.
3. Implement - execute the approved plan in focused, reviewable changes.
4. Verify - run the tests and linter, and fix until green. Do not trust code you have not run.
5. Review and commit - have the model critique its own diff, fix the issues, then commit with a clean message.

Match the model to the step

You do not need your most powerful model for every step. Exploring, implementing a clear plan, and running tests are well within Sonnet's range and cost a fraction of the price. Reach for Opus when the reasoning is genuinely hard: a subtle bug, a tricky architecture decision, a plan you cannot easily sanity-check yourself. A common efficient pattern is Opus for the plan and the self-review, Sonnet for the exploration and the implementation. Haiku is great for narrow lookups and mechanical edits. The workflow above labels a suggested model per step; adjust to your budget and the difficulty.

Why exploration comes first

The most common cause of bad output is a model that started editing before it understood the code. The explore step fixes this by making the first move 'read and report', not 'write'. When the model tells you which files it plans to touch and what conventions it noticed, you get a cheap early signal: if it is looking in the wrong place, you catch it now. In an unfamiliar codebase, this step alone often turns a frustrating session into a smooth one.

Turning a workflow into a habit

Once a workflow works for you, encode it so you do not have to rebuild it each time. Save the step prompts as a note, or better, put your standing preferences in your CLAUDE.md: 'always plan before implementing and wait for my approval', 'always run tests before committing', 'commit messages follow Conventional Commits'. Then every session starts with your workflow baked in. The Claude Code Club curriculum goes deep on building repeatable, high-leverage workflows - this builder is the on-ramp.

Adapting per task type

• Feature work benefits most from a full plan gate - features are where scope creep and wrong assumptions hurt.
• Bug fixes lead with a root-cause hypothesis and the smallest possible change, so you do not paper over the symptom.
• Refactors demand a 'preserve behavior exactly' instruction and small, verifiable steps, because the whole point is that nothing observable changes.
• Codebase research skips implementation entirely - the deliverable is a clear mental model, not a diff.
• Test-writing tasks make running the suite the verification step and emphasize covering edge and failure cases.