The Explore-Plan-Act Prompt Pattern — How Pros Actually Use Claude Code

A three-phase prompt pattern (Explore the codebase, Plan the approach, Act file by file) that separates pros from beginners on Claude Code, Cursor, and ChatGPT Codex. Eliminates the most common AI-coding failure: models inventing file structures and functions that don't exist — two minutes of exploration saves an hour of untangling AI slop.