Promptles
Clarity

Define What Done Looks Like

Say what finished means: the cases that must work, what must not change, and how you'll check.

Claude stops when it thinks the task is finished, so tell it what finished means to you: which cases must work, what must stay unchanged, and how you'll check. Vague: "Add CSV export." Specific: "Add a CSV export to the orders page. Done means the button downloads the rows I've filtered, the column headers match the table, and the existing export tests still pass."

Where you'll practice this

4 Promptles scenarios teach this principle directly. Each one drops you into a real engineering ticket and asks you to write the prompt you'd send to Claude Code.

  • Define Done

    Hana, the product manager, filed a ticket for the staff to-do list in Copper Kettle's admin app: "Sort the to-do list properly." You and Hana agreed what that means: unfinished to-dos before finished ones, and within each group the earliest due date first. The sorting lives in…

  • Build the First Slice

    The favorite-spots contract in `docs/api/spots.md` is approved. Next comes the first slice: just enough of the feature, end to end, to prove the pieces fit (a request in through a real route, checked, saved, and back out). Malik only needs saving and listing to start the app…

  • Say What Done Looks Like

    Your reading list shows three books typed straight into `books.js`. You just finished Beloved and want to add it from the page itself, without editing code. You picture two text boxes at the top, one for the title and one for the author, and an Add button. Your younger sibling…

  • Write the Brief First

    Candidate C won: Acme will build `shipkit`, a release-tooling plugin for its six repos, at `plugins/shipkit/` in `acme/claude-plugins`. Dana wants to start on files today. Last year's internal tool, relbot, began as release-notes drafting, grew a Jira sync, a deploy button, and…

Other principles in Clarity