Build the core

Planning is done. Time to build.

You have every method you need and you've used all of them before:

• Build in dependency order — nothing before what it needs
• Build one thing at a time, testing after each
• Get to something usable as fast as possible
• When it breaks, narrow down rather than staring
• Save a copy before any big change

None of this is new. What's new is that nobody is telling you which order to do it in.

Your first goal today is a program that runs — even if it does almost nothing.

A menu that prints and accepts a choice is enough. Once something runs, you're adding to a working thing. Before that, you're staring at a blank file with everything still to do.

Then hold on to that: never leave your code broken at the end of a session. Finish on something that runs, even if the feature is half-done. Coming back to working code is a completely different experience from coming back to a mess you can't remember.