I Stopped Treating Claude Code Like a Chat Tool — and My Workflow Got More Reliable

Claude Code is excellent at solving hard engineering tasks. But in my own daily work, the biggest losses were not model quality — they were workflow interruptions. I kept seeing the same pattern: long-running tasks got interrupted I returned later and spent too long rebuilding context session switching introduced avoidable confusion This post is about what changed when I restructured my workflow around continuity first. Not a silver bullet. Just a practical setup that reduced restart friction. Problem I was actually facing I initially tried to improve outcomes by tweaking prompts more aggressively. That helped a little, but not enough. The bigger problem was operational: too many mixed objectives inside one session weak handoff when stopping work no lightweight way to check progress when away from desk So I shifted from prompt optimization to workflow optimization. What I changed 1) Single-objective sessions I stopped mixing implementation, debugging, and cleanup in the same thread. Ea