What to include when agentic coding

First, start with prompting for behaviour.

Second, what else to include?

1. Strong preferences for the task at hand:
   • Say use shadcn/ui for the dialog
   • Or state must go through the central store
   • Or use plain sql for complex queries
   • Or don't add any db fields
   • Or this should be a db field
2. Hunches and make it sound like they are:
   • Like, I think this has to do with xyz
   • Or I'm sure there's prior knowledge of this
   • Or do we already have a version of this? Investigate
   • Or we should probably add an integration test for this? Wdyt?
   • Or can we abstract and reuse the comments code in Post.rb? Wdyt?
3. Questions
   • Ask eli5 how we handle publishing posts
   • Or summarize the admin auth
   • Or review @docs/add-comments.md. Focus on simplification and removing complexity
   • Or can we skip the middle step here or would that be worse for users?

We used to discover the details as we went along with the implementation. For agentic coding you want to speed-run this, assisted by the agent, before you let it rip.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

– Abraham Lincoln
  – Mikkel Malmberg