Grilling
Making the model interrogate the plan before building it.
A technique where the agent is instructed to question the request — surfacing ambiguity, missing cases and unstated assumptions — before writing anything.
It exploits a cheap capability: a model is good at finding gaps in a plan, and asking it to do so builds the spec and catches misunderstandings at the moment they are cheapest to fix.
The mechanism is that questions are cheaper than rework. An agent asked to interrogate the request surfaces the ambiguities it would otherwise resolve silently, and silent resolution is where most of the wasted work comes from.
Before writing anything
A vague feature request arrives.
Ask for the five questions that would change the implementation, and answer them first. The standard output is one or two missing requirements nobody had considered — a much better use of fifteen minutes than a review of code built on the wrong assumption.
- docsPrompt engineering overview ↗
Ties each prompting technique to a success criterion and to empirical evaluation, rather than presenting them as a bag of tricks.
- docsBest practices for using GitHub Copilot to work on tasks ↗
Recommends bounded tasks with explicit acceptance criteria, and names what is a bad fit for unattended delegation: ambiguous, security-sensitive, production-critical or deeply domain-specific work.
Spec · Specification
A written description of the intended outcome, before the work starts.
Spec-Driven Development
Write the specification first; let the implementation follow.
Sycophancy
Agreeing with you because you sound sure.
Prototyping · Spike
Build the cheapest thing that answers the question.