CLAUDE.md is not a prompt: starting a Django side project with an agentic AI workflow

I recently started a side project, and I want to do something I've never done before: build it in public. Not with the daily "Day N" theatrics, but milestone by milestone, with honest write-ups of how it actually went. This is post number one. What's worth writing about isn't the app - it's how I started it. The default move with a capable AI assistant is to ask it to do the work: "set up a Django project with PostgreSQL and Docker." Three months later you're staring at a folder structure you can't justify, a license you didn't think about, and a branching strategy you didn't pick.