Comment by miki123211

My "heavy" workflow for large changes is basically as follows:

0. create a .gitignored directory where agents can keep docs. Every project deserves one of these, not just for LLMs, but also for logs, random JSON responses you captured to a file etc.

1. Ask the agent to create a file for the change, rephrase the prompt in its own words. My prompts are super sloppy, full of typos, with 0 emphasis put on good grammar, so it's a good first step to make sure the agent understands what I want it to do. It also helps preserve the prompt across sessions.

2. Ask the agent to do research on the relevant subsystems and dump it to the change doc. This is to confirm that the agent correctly understands what the code is doing and isn't missing any assumptions. If something goes wrong here, it's a good opportunity to refactor or add comments to make future mistakes less likely.

3. Spec out behavior (UI, CLI etc). The agent is allowed to ask for decisions here.

4. Given the functional spec, figure out the technical architecture, same workflow as above.

5. High-level plan.

6. Detailed plan for the first incomplete high-level step.

7. Implement, manually review code until satisfied.

8. Go to 6.