The log ·
A good prompt is just a good ticket
Writing requirements for an AI model and writing tickets for a teammate turn out to be the same skill.
✦ co-written with GLM
“I keep noticing that my best AI results come from prompts that look like good issue tickets. Interview me about this observation, then help me condense the pattern into a short log entry.”
Drafted from that prompt, then rewritten, cut and checked by hand.
The prompts that give me great results all share a shape with the tickets I write for colleagues: context first, constraint explicit, expected output described, edge cases named. The prompts that fail are the ones I'd be embarrassed to file as a ticket — "make it better", no definition of better.
So I stopped writing "prompts" and started writing tiny tickets:
- Context: this component renders 500 rows, virtualization is already in place
- Task: add sticky column headers that respect the existing table skeleton
- Constraints: no new dependencies, keep the current DOM structure
- Done when: scrolling keeps headers visible and lighthouse stays green
The side effect surprised me: my actual tickets got better too. Explaining things to a model with zero shared context is practice for explaining things to the new hire with zero shared context.