Shipping a Side Project with Claude Code
How to use Claude Code to actually finish a side project — not leave it at 60% like the last several.
Side projects stall for a few reasons: the interesting parts get built first, the boring parts get avoided, and then life gets busy. Claude Code addresses the second one directly — the boring parts (auth, forms, email, payment integration, deployment config) are exactly where Claude works fastest.
Build the boring parts first
The conventional advice is to validate before building. Ship an MVP. Don't build until you know people want it. All true for commercial projects.
For side projects the real problem is different: most side projects die because you run out of motivation before they're done. The fix is different too: use Claude to do the boring infrastructure work at the start, so all that's left is the interesting stuff.
Auth, database schema, deployment pipeline, payment integration — give Claude these tasks first. They're tedious to write, Claude handles them well, and getting them done early means you can spend your motivated time on the actual product.
Timebox sessions to 90 minutes
Side project sessions should be short and focused. "I have 90 minutes, let's finish the user profile page" produces a concrete deliverable. "I have some time, let's work on the project" produces meandering progress that's hard to pick up next session.
Claude Code is good at focused, scoped work. Give it a specific thing to finish, work together for 90 minutes, ship what you built, stop. The next session has a clear starting point.
Use CLAUDE.md as persistent state
Side projects have weeks or months between sessions. When you come back after a break, you've forgotten the decisions you made and the conventions you established.
CLAUDE.md as a project journal: add a "decisions" section. "Decided to use Supabase instead of Prisma because..." "Using server-side rendering for the dashboard because..." "Deferred the mobile layout until v2." When you start a new session months later, you and Claude both know where you left off and why.
The feature that always kills momentum
Every side project has one: the feature that's more complicated than you expected and sucks up three weekends without getting done. When you hit it, scope it down. "Simplified version that works for 80% of cases" is almost always the right call.
Ask Claude: "What's the simplest version of this that I could ship?" Then ship that. The perfect version can wait for v2, which may never happen — and that's fine.