A Small Tip for Using AI Agents: Don’t Ask for the Plan Too Soon
A Small Tip for Using AI Agents: Don’t Ask for the Plan Too Soon Recently, while using AI agents to think through product and technical designs, I found a small but useful habit. It is not a complicated prompt trick. It is much simpler than that. Instead of asking the agent to immediately produce a plan, I first ask it to understand my requirement. If anything is unclear, I ask it to question me before writing the final proposal. In other words: Don’t generate the solution yet. First understand what I want. If anything is unclear, ask me questions. After we clarify the details, then give me the plan. This sounds ordinary, but it has improved the quality of the output quite a lot. 1. The problem with asking for a plan too early I used to work with agents in a very direct way. I would describe a rough idea and say something like: Help me design a solution. The agent would usually respond quickly with a complete-looking proposal. The structure was often clean. The logic lo...