The Paper-First Method · 7 steps

The 7 steps of the Paper-First Method.

The Paper-First Method, created by Sohaib Waheed, has seven steps in three beats: Paper (step 1), Pushback (steps 2 to 4) and Production (steps 5 to 7). You do the thinking in the first four steps, and the AI does most of the building in the last three, inside the structure you decided.

Sohaib Waheed
By Sohaib Waheed, creator of the Paper-First Method · About · Updated 14 October 2026
  1. STEP 01

    Draw the page

    One sheet, three boxes: flow, journey, architecture. Draw where a human says yes first. · Paper

  2. STEP 02

    Read it out loud to Claude

    A voice session. Read the whole page, then ask five questions until the page is honest. · Pushback

  3. STEP 03

    Turn the page into an architecture

    Boxes become services, data becomes stores, the AI becomes a retrieval step, a reviewer and a confidence gate. · Pushback

  4. STEP 04

    Pick the stack yourself

    The stack is your call, because you own it in production. · Pushback

  5. STEP 05

    Write the six-line brief

    Stack, structure, AI, rules, done, never. Claude turns it into one build prompt per service. · Production

  6. STEP 06

    Let it build. Review like an architect.

    The AI builds in your structure, one service at a time, with tests after every prompt. · Production

  7. STEP 07

    Ship. Then back to paper.

    Deploys from main, seeded demo data, a three-line runbook. If only you can run it, it isn't done. · Production

Same order every time. Use whichever AI tools you like; keep the order. The templates for each step are free (CC BY 4.0), and the whole method was recorded on one real build: jobfutureai.com, in one evening.