What is the Forge Method? Five rules so your agents stop improvising.

In the first post I told you the story: 20 years as a developer, six months of being scared of AI, $800 in burned tokens, and a stubborn agent named Claudio who taught me — by failing over and over — how to ask for things properly. This post is the method that came out of all that pain. Five rules, one per letter of FORGE. I want to be honest about one thing up front: this is not a framework I invented at a whiteboard. Every rule here is a scar. Each one is the lesson from a specific mistake that cost me money, time, or sleep. I'm going to tell you the mistake first, and then the rule. Because the rule only makes sense once you've felt the pain that created it. Let's go. First, the idea behind all of it Here's the thing nobody told me when I started: A task is not a post-it. It's a contract. When you ask an AI agent for something with no structure, you're not giving an order — you're placing a bet. The agent interprets, assumes, improvises, and the result depends on how much context it managed to reconstruct on its own. Sometimes it guesses right. Often it doesn't. And you only find out after the tokens are gone. The Forge Method is the agreement between you and your agents: you bring the structure, they execute with precision . That's it. Five rules to hold up your end of that contract. F — Focused The mistake: My early tasks had titles like "Fix bug" and "Update stuff." I'd come back twenty minutes later to find the agent had fixed a bug — just not the one I meant. It wasn't wrong. It just had no way of knowing which thing I was talking about. **The rule: **If the title is vague, the task is vague. Vague in, vague out. A focused title needs a domain, an action, and a scope. Two words minimum, and no generic placeholders. ❌ Rejected: - "Fix bug" - "Update auth" - "Do the thing" ✅ Accepted: - "Fix authentication timeout on Nginx reverse proxy" - "Update JWT expiry from 1h to 24h in src/auth/config.ts" The test: Read the title with no context. Do you know the domain,