13votes
2answers
3.1kviews

System prompt for a code-review agent that stops inventing style nitpicks

We run a review agent on every PR in CI. The first version was useless: it left 20 comments per PR, half of them were "consider renaming this variable" on code that hadn't changed, and it flagged form
16votes
2answers
2.7kviews

Structured root-cause prompt that turns a stack trace into a ranked fix list

When I paste a raw stack trace, models tend to fixate on the deepest frame and suggest a fix right there, even when the real cause is three frames up where a bad value was created. The topmost error i
13votes
1answers
1.5kviews

SQL rollup prompt that returns chart-ready buckets with zero-filled gaps

My time-series charts had holes: any hour with no events simply didn't exist in the query result, so the line chart connected across gaps and hid outages. The naive "group by hour" prompt never genera
28votes
1answers
3.2kviews

Prompt for a Snake game that actually feels juicy, not just a grid crawler

Every AI-generated Snake I've seen is technically correct and completely lifeless: a square that jumps one cell per tick with zero feedback. I wanted the arcade-cabinet feeling in a single HTML file.
35votes
1answers
3.4kviews

Prompt that generates an API reference from OpenAPI with realistic examples, not {string}

Generated API docs always have example values like "string", 0, true. Useless. Developers copy them and immediately hit validation errors. I feed the model the OpenAPI schema and force it to invent do
22votes
1answers
2.2kviews

Debugging an intermittent asyncio race the model kept papering over

Had a flaky test that failed maybe 1 in 30 runs. Every model I tried "fixed" it by adding an await asyncio.sleep(0.1) somewhere, which is not a fix, it is a bribe. The real bug was two coroutines muta
21votes
1answers
3.4kviews

GPT prompt to scaffold a Next.js marketing site with sane structure, not one 800-line page.tsx

When I ask for a "Next.js landing page" I get everything crammed into one giant app/page.tsx with inline styles and no separation. Fine for a demo, painful the moment you want to edit the pricing sect
27votes
1answers
3.5kviews

Self-verification step that catches an agent's own hallucinated file paths and APIs

My coding agent kept confidently importing functions that don't exist and referencing files it never opened. The plan looked great, the code didn't run. Classic. What moved the needle was a mandatory
21votes
1answers
2.8kviews

Accessible hover and focus states in one prompt, with a banned-patterns list

The recurring failure: models give me pretty hover effects that vanish for keyboard users, remove the focus outline "because it's ugly", or convey state with color alone. I got tired of fixing the sam
17votes
1answers
2.4kviews

Safely refactoring a 600-line god-function CLI without changing its behavior

Inherited a single def run() that was 600 lines: arg parsing, file IO, business logic, and printing all tangled together. Management wanted features added but touching it was Russian roulette. Asking
12votes
1answers
2.3kviews

One-shot prompt for a Rust + wasm image filter module wired into a web app cleanly

I wanted a real Rust-to-WASM module doing per-pixel work off the main thread, not a toy that ships 4MB of glue and blocks the UI on load. Most prompts gave me code that assumed a specific bundler and
24votes
2answers
3.4kviews

Low-poly procedural terrain in three.js that regenerates from a seed with a flat-shaded look

I was chasing that faceted low-poly island aesthetic. My first attempts used a smooth normal PlaneGeometry so it looked like melted plastic, not crisp facets. Also the terrain wasn't reproducible so I
11votes
2answers
3.2kviews

One-shot prompt for Next.js route handlers with input validation and consistent error shapes

Scaffolding the API layer, I kept getting route handlers that parsed await req.json() with zero validation, returned bare strings on error, and used a different error shape in every file, so the front
14votes
1answers
2.8kviews

PR-review agent that outputs findings bucketed by severity with a fix-first ordering

Reviewers on my team were drowning in unordered agent output: a security bug buried under six style suggestions. Even good findings got missed because there was no triage. I restructured the review ag
10votes
1answers
1.7kviews

Staggered list entrance where items cascade in without a JS timeline library

I wanted a list where items rise and fade in one after another, the classic stagger. My first prompts hardcoded animation-delay per child, which breaks the moment the list length changes, and used a l