Not all prompts were made equal. The difference can mean an unscalable, unreadable, un-refactorable piece of source code. Prompts are important – like HTML elements. The very first till the very last. It will determine whether the code is designed to your spec. Note I mention design because as prompt engineers we need to add this to our bucket of skills – code design and orchestration with AI.
Bad Prompt Examples
- Make me a nice website web app that allows users to book appointments
- Refactor this for me
- Add a page that displays the appointments
- Add dark mode
People who are prompting incorrectly either are too generic or want to accomplish tasks that are too big. Even when we think we are being specific, the truth is that we’re not.
Focus on small tasks and context.
Focusing on small tasks will allow you to achieve greater things in the long run than deciding to refactor your whole codebase at once. How specific or small? That’s up to you to experiment, but here are some examples that I think would achieve better results:
- I’m creating a webbapp that allows users to book appointments. The app needs a calendar view, can you create me just a HTML template of what the calendar can look like. Note I’m using Tailwind, React, AntD.
- Can you identify any repetitive code or function that can be extracted from this #file, please list them only and ask me which one I would like to refactor and where I want to put it before refactoring yourself.
- I’m trying to implement dark mode. Please analyse this #file, and my file structure, and tell me the best approach. Give me at least 3 different approaches. Do not make any changes without my further input.
Conclusion
Getting used to this style of prompt should be easy and natural. Yes it will take longer to achieve things, but better do things correctly than face “Vibe Coding” hell.
For larger projects check out our Prompt Starter Pack.
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