Stop asking AI to "write code" — ask it to "think through" first

The single biggest improvement to my prompts came from separating thinking from doing. ❌ Bad: "Write a function that parses CSV files and validates the data" ✅ Good: "Think through the edge cases in CSV parsing — what can go wrong? Now write a function that handles all of them." The second prompt gets you error handling for: - Empty files - Inconsistent delimiters - Unicode in headers - Rows with wrong column counts AI is a better coder when you make it reason before it acts.