AI Coding Tip 031 - Good prompt: 2026 template with effort, scope, and stopping rules

good-prompt.md

Role: Senior backend engineer refactoring a payment module. Objective: Extract the retry logic in PaymentGateway into its own class. Success criteria: Existing tests pass. Retry behavior stays the same. No new public methods on PaymentGateway. Constraints: Don't touch the database schema. Don't add new dependencies. Output format: A diff, followed by a two-sentence summary of what moved. Stopping rules: If a test needs new mocking infrastructure to pass, stop and ask before adding it. Otherwise proceed without confirming each file. Effort: medium.