I spent 80% of my time planning and 20% coding with AI tools

Built three apps last month using AI coding tools. Two are profitable ($120 total revenue), one was just to test something.

I wanted to test the theory of dedicating 80% of my time to planning and creating structured docs

painpoint.space took 6 days total. I spent 5 days just... planning. Maybe 8 hours actually coding. Got my first $20/month customer about a week later.

I used to jump straight into Cursor and start asking it to build stuff. Waste hours explaining the same context over and over. Get frustrated when it forgets what we're building between sessions.

So before opening any IDE, I workshopped with Claude to create context documents on - What exactly the app does - Every single feature - How the database should work - Even custom rules for my AI assistant

Felt like procrastinating at first. But when I finally started coding, everything just... worked. The AI understood immediately. No confusion, no re-explaining.

To test this wasn't a fluke, I tried building legaldiff.com with just 7 prompts. Not 7 sessions, 7 total prompts from idea to working app. It worked because all the context was already there.

Results from three apps - painpoint.space: $40/month recurring (finds business ideas from Reddit) - renewpic.com: $130 made, 260+ users signed up - legaldiff.com: working MVP in 7 prompts

The pattern is consistent. More upfront planning = way less back-and-forth with AI.

My co-founder and I are now building this into a repeatable system (precursor.tools). Got 80 people on the waitlist just from talking about this approach.

Curious if others have stumbled into this. The better your planning, the less you actually need to "code" with these AI tools.