A couple of days ago I posted about my workflow and I made light fun of something I do:

I also give it context to save time. The agents nowadays are very smart and can find their way, but I can shortcut that by giving it hints “in internal/foo/foo.go there’s a function called DoFoo() and it does this and that and I want it to do that other thing before that” or whatever. Less tokens, faster iteration. This is probably astrology for nerds, pure superstition at this point, but I still do it.

Turns out, maybe it’s not really astrology for nerds? Today, Quinn Slack shared an article about How To Pair with an Agent and in it, the author says “The more you can specify, the better” and gives this example of a good, specified prompt:

Specified prompt:

Build a new API endpoint for user notifications. Follow the pattern in src/api/messages.ts as your reference. Run the API tests after each step. Don’t move on until they pass.

You gave it a reference to follow and a way to check its own work. Now you can step away. Let the agent iterate until the tests pass.

So maybe it’s not astrology for nerds, but a good practice? I always felt like it gave me better results, but I wasn’t 100% sure if it wasn’t just a superstition. Nice to see it’s probably not.