Say What to Do When Unsure

Where you'll practice this

2 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.

• Find the Right Doc

  This afternoon's call with Northwind needs a summary of the current pricing. Mina Cho, head of product marketing, keeps the only pricing sales may quote, in the Go-To-Market folder. A Drive search for "pricing" returns four files (below), and two of them were edited this month.…

• Track Down the Digest Failure

  The test `sends the digest at 9am local time` checks that the subscriber digest email gets scheduled for 9am in each customer's own timezone. It fails in CI about once every 12 runs and has never failed on anyone's laptop. Last month someone added a retry around it, and it went…

Other principles in Constraints

• Define Component Boundaries

  When splitting a component, give the decisions already made and say nothing on screen should change.

• Define Inputs and Outputs

  Say what goes in, what comes out, and what happens with bad input. Leave the inside to Claude.

• Define the Business Logic

  Turn business words into exact rules: the fields, the thresholds, and how they combine.

• Deprecate Before Removing

  Keep the old name working for a release, point to the replacement, and announce when it goes away.

• Describe Edge Cases

  Name the unusual cases you know about and what should happen in each.

• Describe Type Contracts

  Tell Claude the rules the code doesn't show, like allowed values and optional fields. It can work out the rest.