Claude Code tutorial: feature planning, Ralph loops and QA

Matt Pocock uses Claude Code to add features to his course video manager, a locally run React Router application with TypeScript, Node and Postgres. The tutorial follows a coding assistant workflow through requirements, autonomous implementation and manual QA. It does not demonstrate local model inference.

Pocock starts with his Grill Me skill to clarify direct lesson creation and deletion, plus planned courses that have no directory on disk. The discussion defines when creating a lesson should require a course file path. He also updates a shared terminology document so that terms such as "materialize" have a consistent meaning.

He turns the conversation into a product requirements document and four implementation issues in GitHub. His provisionally named Sandcastle setup runs Claude in Docker, then applies its commits to the local repository as patches. A Ralph loop works through the issues sequentially; Pocock reports completion after five iterations.

Manual QA exposes problems that planning missed, including broken navigation and database/filesystem inconsistencies when a directory is not a Git repository. Pocock submits feedback as new issues while the loop handles fixes. He stresses running tests and type checks on every commit, but leaves further QA open at the end rather than establishing that the feature is free of bugs.