aihero.dev had a post about tracer bullets — the idea from Pragmatic Programmer where you build a thin vertical slice end-to-end before filling anything in. I started applying it explicitly with Claude Code, using this as a standing instruction:

## Tracer Bullets

When building features, build a tiny, end-to-end slice of the feature first,
seek feedback, then expand out from there.

Before this, I’d give Claude a task and it would try to build the whole thing at once. On anything with multiple layers — a new API route wired up to a UI component with state management — I’d get a large diff I couldn’t reason about. Something would be wrong and I’d have to hunt for it.

Now Claude breaks it down explicitly. First the endpoint and one hardcoded UI call. Make it run. Then expand. Errors surface before they compound, and if the first slice goes sideways, the cost is small.

The original post frames this as “keeping AI slop under control.” That’s about right.