Stage 3 · Lesson 1 of 7
Small, checkable tasks
The single biggest improvement to your results is asking for less at a time. Break work into steps enough that you can describe the change in a sentence or two and check it in a few minutes, then give the tool one step at a time. "Add user accounts" becomes the users table migration, then the sign-up endpoint with tests, then login, each reviewed and committed before the next.
Small steps fail small: when something breaks, you know which step caused it, and every is short enough to actually read. They also keep the clean and make it easy to throw away a bad attempt.
Common trapchaining ten steps into one prompt because it feels efficient, then facing a diff too large to review honestly.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Prompt Engineering for Software Engineers
Design Gurus · Beginner · Subscription
A structured course on prompting for engineering work: specs, context, examples and iteration
- GuideFreeAnthropic Prompt Engineering Documentation
Anthropic
Free and model-agnostic in spirit: be clear and direct, give examples, let the model think
Keep handy
Also worth your time
When to plan, how to edit a plan, and starting over from the plan instead of patching