Anti-Patterns

The clearest sign of a vague prompt is a vague app.

These are the most common prompting mistakes and how to correct them.

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Anti-pattern 1: The vague prompt

What it looks like:

Build a social media app.

Why it fails: The Agent has no information about roles, core features, visual direction, or data. It will make every decision on its own, and those decisions probably aren’t what you had in mind.

Fix: Cover all five parts of the prompt anatomy (identity, roles, features, data, visual direction) before submitting.

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Anti-pattern 2: The implementation brief

What it looks like:

Create a Node.js backend with Express, a PostgreSQL database using Prisma ORM, and a Next.js frontend. Add a users table with email, password_hash, and created_at columns. Build a POST /auth/register endpoint.

Why it fails: You’ve constrained the Agent’s architecture with requirements it doesn’t need and may be designed to override. You’ve also mixed implementation concerns with product concerns, which produces unpredictable output.

Fix: Describe what users can do, not how it should be built. “Users can sign up with their email and password” is the correct version of the above.

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Anti-pattern 3: The stacked request

What it looks like:

Add a search bar to the header, change the sidebar to dark mode, fix the card spacing on the dashboard, add email notifications for new bookings, and move the settings page to a modal instead of a separate route.

Why it fails: Five changes at once means five opportunities for misinterpretation. Some will land, some won’t, and you won’t easily know which.

Fix: One change per prompt. Break this into five separate messages and verify each one before moving to the next.

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Anti-pattern 4: The missing visual direction

What it looks like:

A prompt with detailed feature requirements but no design guidance whatsoever.

Why it fails: The Agent will make reasonable default choices, but “reasonable” is not the same as “what you had in mind.” Changing design direction late in a build is expensive. It can affect dozens of components.

Fix: Add at least one sentence of visual direction to every first prompt. Even something as short as “dark mode, minimal, purple accent” meaningfully narrows the design space. For a more distinctive result, follow the guidance in section 8.

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Anti-pattern 5: Asking Mayson to guess your business logic

What it looks like:

Add a subscription system.

Why it fails: “Subscription” could mean a hundred different things: free trial, usage-based, seats-based, flat monthly, annual discount, feature gating by tier. The Agent doesn’t know your pricing model.

Fix: Be explicit about what the subscription does for users:

Add a two-tier subscription system. Free users can create up to 3 projects. Pro users ($12/month) can create unlimited projects and access the export feature. Use Stripe for billing. Show an upgrade prompt when free users hit the project limit.

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Anti-pattern 6: Correcting without context

What it looks like:

That's not right, make it better.

Why it fails: The Agent doesn’t know what “not right” means or what “better” looks like to you. It will make its own judgment, which may move in the wrong direction entirely.

Fix: Always specify what is wrong, what you want instead, and what should stay the same. “The card titles are too small, increase to 16px. Keep everything else on the card the same.”

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