Prompts for Developers

A developer's week is a repository somebody else wrote, an estimate wanted before the unknowns are known, a refactor the roadmap will not wait for, a test suite that is slow and still misses the bugs that reach production, a stack trace at an inconvenient hour, and a review queue. This is a library of 24 prompts for that work: understanding code you did not write, design decisions, writing and refactoring, testing, debugging and incidents, and documentation and review.

Each prompt tells the model what angle to take, what input to work from, what structure to return and the one constraint that separates a professional answer from a generic one. They are built for the parts that go wrong: orienting in a codebase and marking which conclusions were read and which were guessed, writing an ADR that describes rejected options fairly, planning a refactor in steps that are each mergeable today, pinning legacy behaviour before you change it, phasing a data migration with the point of no return named, and reviewing your own diff for the line most likely to cause an incident. Every prompt has a when to use line and a line on how to judge the answer, and the file ends with chains that run these prompts end to end.

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