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Why it matters?

Let me tell you a quick story.

Imagine two developers starting the same project on the same day.

The first is a craft-first engineer. He builds everything from scratch, no shortcuts, no generators. When something breaks, he reads the docs, traces the issue, and fixes it line by line. His code is solid, intentional, and deeply understood.

The second is my kind of developer — a systems thinker. Not lazy, not careless — just extremely intentional about efficiency. He focuses less on writing every line himself and more on how fast and cleanly the system comes together. I call this the efficiency-level-v coder mindset.

Here’s the interesting part.

The craft-first engineer sets up everything manually: configs, boilerplate, folder structures — all carefully written. Deep ownership, yes, but it takes time.

Meanwhile, the systems thinker already has 90% of the product in place, following best practices, with a clean structure and room to scale.

How did he do that?

That’s what this blog is about.

So who’s better?

There was a time when AI wasn’t that impactful, and the advice was to write slowly yourself rather than rely on AI.

But times have changed.

Just yesterday, Moonshot AI released Kimi K2, an open-source model that benchmarks even better than Claude Opus 4.5. Let me remind you — Claude Opus 4.5 is already a beast with complex coding logic.

The takeaway? If you know how to orchestrate these models, you can ship faster — and more importantly, ship robustly.

How to get started

College students can get GitHub Pro with their college ID, giving access to monthly premium credits for Claude Sonnet 4.5. There are other models, but Claude Sonnet 4.5 shines for real-world development.

Once you have Claude ready, here’s how to make it work for you.

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1. Learn to prompt efficiently

Early on, I used to tell AI things like:

“Hey, fix this error.”

It didn’t work. The AI couldn’t understand the problem.

The key lesson? Provide full context. Explain clearly:

• The problem
• What you want
• What path to follow
• What not to do

All in a single prompt.

Example:

Bad prompt:

Fix the backend bug.

Better prompt:

In our Express + Prisma backend, the POST /users endpoint fails when an email already exists. Prisma throws a unique constraint error. We want to return a 409 response instead of crashing the server. Suggest a fix and include proper error-handling patterns.

Always give context — browser console errors, TypeScript errors, compilation failures, or refactor requests.

Also, leverage your IDE fully. Whether it’s VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, or Emacs, it doesn’t matter — what matters is how you use it. Include specific files or folders in prompts, and never accidentally expose secrets like .env files.

I would highly recommend you to try out Skillsmp. it is a collections of high quality md files for manuplating claude models behavior. it is free for all and too simple to use but very effective.

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2. Never start from scratch

Hackathons or serious projects? Always start with a template.

Smart coders aren’t lazy — they’re efficient. Templates save time and reduce errors.

If you’re working with Next.js, check Vercel’s starter templates. GitHub has gems too, though sometimes slower to find.

For example, right now I’m participating in a hackathon at IIT Gandhinagar. We needed to build an admin dashboard for our problem statement. By starting with a ready-made shadcn admin dashboard template, I was able to work smarter and faster, focusing on the logic and features that mattered instead of reinventing boilerplate. and here is what i was able to deliver in just 2 days: Hackathon Project Link(currently going..). its pretty big project for me. wish me luck.

Anyways, So what i'm saying is When you start with a solid template, you can focus on:

• Problem statement
• Tech stack
• Libraries to use

The result? A clean, stable project that didn’t break randomly.

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3. Use libraries wisely

When adding a new feature, ask yourself: do I really need to reinvent this?

If the feature involves complex state management or edge cases, use a library. I’ve had AI try to implement “simple” features by creating custom hooks and utilities inside a component, messing up my clean structure. Libraries exist for a reason — use them.

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Conclusion

The craft-first approach is great for adding critical features to an established project.

But for building a strong foundation and shipping fast, the efficient systems thinker approach wins every time.

Thanks for reading.