Before You Begin
Two things define your experience with Stadium 8. Neither is technical.
Scope creep
Section titled “Scope creep”Claude over-builds. Ask it to paint the kitchen and it may want to replace the tiles, the cabinets and the lights too. All reasonable. None of it what you asked for.
Counter this in three places.
In your requirements: say what you want, and say what you don’t need yet. “Users can log in with email and password. No social login, no password reset for now.” That gives Claude a boundary to work within.
In your plan review: at the end of Intake, Claude proposes the full list of epics. Remove any you don’t need before you approve the plan.
In your story review: this is the most important guardrail. Before an epic is built, Claude proposes its stories. Read each one and ask whether you need it right now. Everything you approve gets built, tested and committed, so remove unnecessary stories before the build starts.
The goal is to build exactly what’s needed, not everything that could be built.
Epics and stories
Section titled “Epics and stories”All work is organised into epics and stories. An epic is a major feature area, such as user authentication, order management or an admin panel. A story is one specific thing a user can do or notice within that epic.
A story is not a technical task and not an entire feature. It’s one user-visible action: “A user can log in with their email and password.”
When you review Claude’s stories, your job is to confirm the scope is right, with nothing missing and nothing unnecessary. See Epics and Stories for more.
Ready? Start with What You Need.