Common Anti-Patterns to Avoid

These are the prompting habits that quietly waste your time. Watch for them in your own sessions.

• The vague wish. "Make a good login page." Good by whose standard? Replace adjectives with specifics: which fields, which validation, which framework.
• The mega-prompt. Dumping an entire feature in one message. Break it into steps you can verify one at a time.
• The silent context. Assuming the AI remembers or knows your project. Restate the relevant files, types, and conventions — especially in a fresh conversation.
• The blind accept. Pasting generated code without reading it. The AI is confident even when wrong; you are still the engineer of record.
• The endless retry. Re-running "try again" hoping for different output. If two attempts fail, the prompt is the problem — add context or constraints, do not just reroll.
• The moving target. Changing requirements mid-thread without restating them. Summarize the current spec when you pivot, so the AI is not working from a stale picture.
• The flattery loop. Accepting "You're absolutely right!" as evidence the fix is correct. Agreement is not verification — run the code and check the behavior yourself.