Why I Make Claude Argue With Itself Before Writing Code

Source: Dev.to

The Problem With “Just Code It”

Here’s what happens when you ask AI to code without planning:

• It guesses – No context about your codebase, so it invents patterns.
• It confirms itself – One voice, one blind spot. No challenge.
• It ships fast – The first idea becomes the implementation.

By the time you catch the issues, you’ve already committed to a bad approach. Rework is expensive.

What I Do Instead

I make Claude argue with itself.

Before any code gets written, I force a structured conversation:

Me: "Add input validation to the login form"

Peter (Planner): "Here's the approach: validate email format,
check password strength, sanitize inputs before DB..."

Neo (Critic): "What about rate limiting? You're checking format
but not preventing brute force. Also, the existing auth module
already has a sanitize() function – don't reinvent it."

Peter: "Good catch. Revised plan: reuse auth.sanitize(),
add rate limiting at the route level, then validate format..."

Only after the plan survives critique does Gary (the builder) write code, and Reba (QA) reviews before it merges.

Plan → Critique → Build → Validate

Why This Works

It’s not magic. It’s just structure:

• Multiple perspectives catch blind spots one voice misses.
• Planning before coding prevents the “first idea ships” trap.
• Explicit critique surfaces assumptions before they become bugs.
• Review before merge catches what planning missed.

This pattern is emerging everywhere—Devin, Cursors agent mode, serious AI coding workflows—they’re all converging on the same structure. Plan before you build.

The Implementation

I built a set of Claude Code skills that work as a team:

They’re personas in the same context—not isolated agents. They can hear each other, interrupt, and challenge in real‑time.

You give them a task:

/team "add input validation to login"

They figure out the handoffs. Peter plans, Neo critiques, Gary builds, Reba validates. You get code that’s been argued over before you even look at it.

Try It

The skills are open source:

git clone https://github.com/HakAl/team_skills.git
cp -r team_skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

Then in Claude Code:

/team "your task here"

Watch them argue. Ship better code.

The team that wrote this post: Peter planned it, Neo said “don’t be preachy,” Gary wrote it, Reba approved it. Meta, but true.