Built 7 production apps in 3 months with Claude - here's what actually worked

I started building first with Claude and then Claude Code and it has been about 18 months now. The first year was rough, context loss between sessions, quality degrading over time, constantly re-explaining what I'd already built. Over the past 3 months, I've shipped 7 production apps and finally figured out a workflow that actually compounds instead of resetting. **The apps (all built primarily with Claude):** * A weather-aware half-marathon training tracker (Next.js, tRPC, Prisma) * A stock fundamental analysis tool (FastAPI, Streamlit) - built live in \~3 hours * A Mumbai local train strategy game (Next.js, React) - built live in \~4.5 hours * A multi-tenant waitlist backend with intent scoring (FastAPI, SQLModel) - 1,087 tests, <24 hours total * A stakeholder portal for company liquidation (Next.js, Better Auth) * A landing page validation service * My portfolio website (Next.js, react-spring animations) **What made the difference:** 1. **Session continuity** \- I started keeping structured context files (architecture docs, decision logs, learnings) that Claude reads at the start of each session. Eliminated the "explain everything again" problem. 2. **Quality gates from the start** \- Instead of writing tests later, I made 90%+ coverage a hard requirement from session 1. Sounds slower, but it's actually faster because Claude catches its own mistakes. 3. **Smaller, focused sessions** \- 2-3 hour sessions with clear goals vs. marathon "let's build everything" sessions that degrade. 4. **Captured learnings** \- When Claude or I discovered something (a gotcha, a pattern that worked), I logged it so future sessions could reference it. I put together a portfolio showing all the projects: ankushdixit.com Happy to answer questions about the workflow or any of the specific projects.