Most prompting advice is written for people who want AI to write emails. Engineers have completely different needs — and different failure modes.

The engineer's failure modes

Underspecifying constraints, not providing context about the existing codebase, accepting the first output without pushing back.

The four things every engineering prompt needs

Context: what exists already, what constraints exist. Goal: what you're actually trying to achieve. Format: how you want the output structured. Verification criteria: how will you know if the answer is correct?

Concrete examples

Bad prompt vs good prompt for: writing a function, debugging an error, architecture decisions.

The meta-skill

Good prompting is the same skill as good spec writing. If you can't write a clear prompt, you don't understand the problem well enough yet.

The quality of your prompt reveals the quality of your thinking. Fix the thinking first.