Zalcro

The pre-build planning tool for vibe coders and AI builders

Productivity

Developer Tools

Artificial Intelligence

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the mapping out of component boundaries before starting is pretty tempting. i've been known to jump straight into coding and then wonder why things get tangled. could be a good wake-up call to plan first!

This is nice, I've seen so many people miss out on the architecture part, especially non tech peeps.

I've been one of the few who tested out Zalcro early on, and I decided to start with building something that I knew already is live and I had built with AI over a few weeks. I had built my own systems. I knew what works, what doesn't, and what the end architecture diagram would look like, even though I did not have a formalized version of it.

To test Zalcro out, I just gave a very small initial prompt on what I wanted to build and what I wanted the end version to look like. The prompts that Zalcro gave me with the entire architecture diagram are something that I ended up coming to after a few weeks of building on my own. If I had this at the start, I wouldn't have to spend that much time on it and to me, that is what made a differentiating factor for Zalcro.

It's like a planning tool for all your AI builds to ensure that context does not get lost over multiple iterations. There's a single structural diagram in play, and everything follows through from that initial architecture without having you cross-check or come back to it again. Or coming back after a few iterations, to see that your agent has done a completely different job of what you expected it to do structurally.

You can see the insight and thoughtfulness with which David has built Zalcro and it's an overall phenomenal build!

The way I have always done which worked great for me is by simply discussing my overall idea with Claude Code like a brainstorming session, leading to an architecture discussion, possibly some evals on sample data when that's available to see if our hypothesis stands among other things. There is a lot of back and forth clarifying things for each other. A lot of times Claude Code recommends things I would have never thought about. At times it can also sound silly. However, this is the most important phase in my process and Claude starts writing code later when I am convinced with everything. Even in that case I am never locking down an architecture knowing that things can change as we build and discover things along the way. I have been perfectly fine with this approach. My only issue with Claude is not remembering clear instructions, getting stuck on certain solutions by just doing lazy tweaks over and over when something doesn't work instead of thinking of and implementing something totally different and so on.

How would Zalcro help improve the experience for someone like me in a major way? I am using the world's best coding agent (arguably) with their best models. Why should I switch to Zalcro for the initial planning phase? What's making Zalcro better than Claude Code at this?

@davidoduk this looks to be a great way to increase success and accuracy of the build. Do all the planning and specification design upfront to guide the agent down the path you want. Best of luck with the launch.

To answer your question, my biggest headache is the AI forgetting a decision I made twenty prompts earlier and quietly rewriting something that was working fine. I gotta say the idea of handing it an architecture diagram plus prompts in order sounds like it would stop a lot of that. Curious how it holds up on a messy idea instead of a clean todo app.