The Dumb Prompt

Exact paths, exact signatures, one command - and nothing left to interpret. 👋 I'm Anton - a software engineer working mostly in PHP/Symfony and Go, currently carving a live PHP monolith into Go services. Part 2 of this series was about how small a unit of work has to get before anyone can execute it blind. This part is about the text of that unit: what I write down, and the phrases I've banned from my own writing. Notes: github.com/brilliant-almazov . Maybe this is useful to you, maybe you already do it better, maybe you read it completely differently. As before: these are my habits on one codebase, not advice for yours. Three holes in one page I once wrote a task the way I'd write it for a person sitting two desks away. It read fine. It also had three phrases in it that weren't instructions at all: instead of the contract: take the contract from the neighbouring spec instead of the values: check against the previous implementation instead of a decision already made: agree on the approach The executor fell into all three, in order. The first one sent it reading neighbouring packages, because "the neighbouring spec" is an address, and an address has to be resolved before it can be used. The second one made it pick a sample - and the sample it picked was not the one I had in mind, because I never said which one I had in mind. The third one ended the run: it came back with a clarifying question, having produced nothing. That's not a bad day and it isn't a bad executor. It's three holes in one page of text, each one dug by a phrase I wrote myself. the task I wrote what the executor did ────────────────────────────────── ───────────────────────────────── "take the contract from the ──▶ read the neighbouring packages neighbouring spec" "check against the previous ──▶ picked a sample - the wrong one implementation" "agree on the approach" ──▶ came back with a question, produced nothing The diagnosis A task is executed literally. Anything phrased as a choice becomes the exe