Still deciding what you want to build? This is a way to get there when the task lives in your hands, not your head.
Sometimes you know you want 3B to build something, you just can’t put words to it. You do the task all the time, but it lives in your hands as a habit rather than in your head as instructions, and the moment you try to describe it, it goes slippery. When that happens, don’t force the prompt. Go do the task by hand first, and pay close attention to what you’re actually doing.
Why the steps hide from you
You already know how to do this job. You probably do it so often you’ve stopped noticing the steps, which is exactly the problem: they’ve gone automatic, so you’ve never had to say them out loud. Walking through the task by hand drags those steps back into the light. Once you can see them, writing the prompt is the easy part.
Slow the task down
Say you handle new-hire onboarding and you want an app to help you run it. On autopilot the whole thing feels like a single move: “I get the new person set up.” Slow it right down and narrate each step, and it turns into something more like this:
- You read the new hire’s details off the HR form.
- You create their accounts in the tools their role needs.
- You add them to the right groups and distribution lists.
- If they’re a contractor, you set an access expiry date.
- You send their manager a note to say everything’s ready.
That narration is basically your prompt. Each step is something 3B can build: a form, a check, a decision, an action. You never needed the technical vocabulary. You needed your own process, spelled out, and the build follows from there.
Watch for the parts you skip
Two things tend to hide from you while you do this. The first is the decisions you make without noticing, the little “if this, then that” forks, like the contractor check above. Those are branches 3B needs to know about, and they’re the easiest to leave out precisely because they feel too obvious to mention. The second is any point where you pause to check something or wait for something, which usually becomes a check or a condition in the build.
The goal isn’t a flawless script. It’s just to get the shape of the task out of your hands and into words. Once you can read your own steps back to yourself, you’re holding the outcome and the sequence, which is most of a good prompt already.
That’s the planning sorted. Now for saying it out loud. Anatomy of a good prompt: how to set things up so 3B gets it right the first time.