Week 3

Idea to production

Prompting as a skill

Debugging with the agent

Security essentials

Practice

Assignment

Back to Track

The quality of what the agent builds tracks the quality of what you asked for. Prompting isn't magic words — it's the same skill as writing a good task ticket.

The task template

Four parts, most tasks need all four:

• Goal — what should exist when this is done.
• Context — where things live, what already exists, what to reuse (Week 2: point it to the map).
• Boundaries — what not to touch, what to ask about first (Week 2).
• Done when — acceptance criteria you can actually check.

Compare:

❌ "Add date formatting"

✅ "Goal: show 'Member since' on the profile card. Context: the card is Features/Profile/ProfileView.swift; date helpers live in Core/Format/. Boundaries: don't modify Models/ — ask first if needed. Done when: the date renders in the same style as the other card rows, and the empty state (no date) shows nothing."

The second prompt is longer to write and dramatically cheaper to review — the agent guesses less, so you correct less.

Break big tasks into steps

A task that needs a whole afternoon should never be one prompt. Split along the flow stages: skeleton first, then one behavior at a time. Each step small enough that its diff is readable (Week 2's rule). If you can't name the steps, ask the agent to propose a breakdown — in plan mode — and edit its list before any code.

Show, don't describe

When you want consistency, point at an example instead of describing style: "format this like the planPill row above it" beats three sentences of adjectives. The agent imitates existing code better than it interprets prose.

Add a member since date

Goal: show 'Member since' on the profile card. Context: the card is Features/Profile/ProfileView.swift; date helpers live in Core/Format/. Boundaries: don't modify Models/ — ask first if needed. Done when: the date renders in the same style as the other card rows, and the empty state shows nothing.

Same task, same starting commit: 5 files touched — including Models/ and the auth layer — vs. 2 files, exactly where the work belongs.

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