The Wrong Unit of Work: What Happened When I Built My Dev Environment using Claude Code

I use Claude Code daily for real product engineering. I'm building a clinical trials platform at PhaseV, and Claude Code is my primary coding partner across a multi-repo microservices stack. Recently I asked it to set up a local Docker Compose dev environment with multi-instance support. It took 15 commits across 10+ sessions to get there. Not because the problem was hard, but because the first session produced everything as one intertwined system instead of building up to it incrementally. What I Asked For Several backend services, a frontend, and shared infrastructure. Each service in its own repo. I wanted a central repo that orchestrates everything with Docker Compose so a developer can run docker compose up . I mentioned that multi-instance support would be important — being able to run the stack twice for different feature branches. What I Got The first session produced everything at once: A compose.yaml with include s for each service A shared Dockerfile for all Python services