1 min lesson
How they cluster
In "How they cluster", respond to "What single sentence captures why every anti-pattern in the taxonomy is recoverable?" Give the answer first and the evidence second.
Step 1 of 3
How they clusterthree root causes
Notice the through-line. Nearly every guardrail in the right column is something we already covered: the well-formed PR, the layered review with a non-collapsible human gate, intent-asserting tests, least privilege, outcome metrics over volume. The anti-patterns aren't exotic. They're what you get when you skip the disciplines. Your job in the field is to spot which discipline a team dropped, then restore it.
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Full explanation
The canonical prompt anti-pattern
The canonical prompt anti-patternwhere prompt-and-pray actually starts
Most prompt-and-pray messes begin with the same move: a vague prompt on the most expensive model. "Make the app better" on a frontier model, expecting horsepower to substitute for direction. With no concrete target the agent makes blind, scattershot edits, which burns tokens, then burns more tokens reading and fixing the bad code it just wrote: a compounding blind edits → read/fix → more tokens loop that drives cost up and quality down at the same time. Power on a fuzzy task is the worst of both worlds.
- Vague (drives the loop)
- "Make the app better."
- Scoped (names surface, change, constraints)
- "Under the shop page, add an in-stock filter next to the existing tag and sort controls. Preserve URL query params and update tests if needed."
- Vague (drives the loop)
- Any model, no success check
- Scoped (names surface, change, constraints)
- Match model power to task; in plan mode for anything non-trivial
| Vague (drives the loop) | Scoped (names surface, change, constraints) |
|---|---|
| "Make the app better." | "Under the shop page, add an in-stock filter next to the existing tag and sort controls. Preserve URL query params and update tests if needed." |
| Any model, no success check | Match model power to task; in plan mode for anything non-trivial |
Specificity, not model price, is what stops the blind-edit loop. The fix is a concrete success check, plan mode first and a fresh agent when context bloats.
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Optional practice
Practice: How they cluster
QWhy is 'make the app better' on the most expensive model the canonical anti-pattern, and what's the fix?