Give your coding agent instructions it can actually build from — and get working software instead of confident nonsense.
You type a request into a coding tool, hit enter, and watch it work for forty seconds. It edits three files, runs a command, and reports success in a confident paragraph — that may or may not match what you wanted. This is about closing that gap.
You can write prompts with four parts. You can feed the agent the right context and starve it of noise. Now picture the next real task on your list and how differently it goes.
You ask for "a login form" and get a new page, a form library you don't use, a fake authentication call, and inline CSS that clashes with everything. You learn to start from what goes wrong, so the agent builds what you actually meant.
You have a 40-file project and one request: "Add a logout button to the header." To be safe, you paste App.jsx, the routing file, your auth helper, the API client, and the nav CSS — and you learn why too much context fails as badly as too little.
The agent hands back a diff: twelve files changed, a new helper, a couple of tests, and a cheerful note that everything is "working as expected." You learn to read the change itself instead of trusting the summary.
On a real project you usually want one of three things from the agent: a small new feature, a fix for a bug you can name, or tests that prove the code does what you claim. You learn to prompt each one for the question it actually answers.
You tell the agent, "Fix the date so it shows correctly." You mean the format your European users expect — day before month. The agent reads "correctly" against its own default, likely month before day, confirms the date renders without error, and reports success.
Take a real or imagined task and run it through the four blocks before anything fancy: write the goal in one sentence; if it says "better," "clean up," or "improve," rewrite it with a concrete result; then list the context — one file path and one pattern to follow.
Here's a request as a beginner often writes it: "Add some error handling to the upload feature." The agent has to guess what "error handling" means, where the upload feature lives, which errors matter, and when to stop. You watch it get rewritten into something buildable.
Before you send, run the prompt through these.
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