Im getting super hyped about using Claude Code to clean up this massive legacy Django project I inherited for work. Its a total mess, like thousands of lines of spaghetti code that I need to stabilize before our big launch in about two months. My budget is tight so Im trying to do this mostly solo but the technical debt is seriously stressing me out.

I spent all night scrolling through docs and GitHub threads. I saw some people swearing by creating custom system prompts for architectural patterns, while others insist that just feeding it the whole directory structure is the way to go. Honestly Im still confused because those suggestions feel way too broad for my specific refactoring needs. Im not sure if I should be focusing on mastering specific CLI commands, context window management, or maybe building out a better testing suite first so Claude doesnt hallucinate breaking changes into my production flow. Does anyone have a concrete workflow they actually use for this? Which specific skills or setups have you found actually save you time instead of just making you spend hours fixing the code Claude generated?