I don’t depend on one shot prompts with lots of constraints to reliably produce, well, anything.

For any nontrivial task I spend 2-8 hours in specification (I spent 3-4 hours on a stateless rust CLI tool design this weekend) and detailed task breakdown in implementation planning.

I use TDD to start with red tests that turn green when acceptance criteria are met.

I write agents to use to check work and they are my enforcers of constraints, as well as fresh eyes. I use these agents for spec review, plan review and code review.

I am actually pretty proud of the projects I create with generative AI. I just apply a lot of discipline so I don’t end up with slop.