Time Travel Coding: Stop Burning Tokens - Build It in the .md First

Most of the tokens I see people burn with AI coding tools go into one thing: rebuilding code that should never have been written.

You ask for an app. The agent builds it. You look at it and think "oh no, that's wrong," and "we should add this," and "let's change that." Every one of those changes is paid for again in tokens, because now the agent is rewriting a real program, not a plan.

I work the other way around. I call it Time Travel Coding.

The idea

An idea isn't real until it's written down. So the .md file is the beginning, and the program is the end. In between, you do your time travelling inside the .md file, where changes cost almost nothing.

The steps

1. Write the idea in the .md. Plain words: who it's for, what it does, how it should feel.
2. Ask your agent: "Can you see what this looks like when it's finished?" Let it describe the finished program, screen by screen.
3. Ask it to upgrade that ending. What's missing? What's confusing? What would make it great? Write the upgrades back into the .md.
4. Travel further: "If this grew every day at our pace, what would it look like in 30 years?" You won't build all of that, but it shows you where the program is heading, so today's version doesn't block tomorrow's.
5. Keep upgrading the .md until it can't be improved any more. When the agent's new ideas are small or repeat themselves, the plan is ready.
6. Only then, build.

Why it works

• Plans are cheap, rebuilds are expensive. Rewriting a paragraph costs a few tokens. Rewriting a program costs thousands, and it breaks things that already worked.
• The agent builds better from a complete plan. It knows every screen, every rule and every word before it writes a line, so it makes fewer wrong turns.
• You catch the big mistakes before they're code. The "oh no" moment happens in the .md, where it's free.

A tip for the look

Put the rules it's not allowed to break in the .md too: no glowing gradients, no cards inside cards, one accent colour, the real words on every screen. Then, after the build, have the agent open the app in a browser, take a screenshot and check it against those rules, not against its own taste. Its own taste is the average of the internet. Your rules are what make it yours.

Short version

Iterate the plan, not the program.

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I'm building a community for people who code with AI: vibe coders, Claude Code users, agent builders, beginners too. AI has a new name, Super Intelligence (SI), so that's what we called it: r/SuperIntelligenceI on Reddit. Come share what you're building and how you plan it.