How do you train yourself to write prompts that prevent coding agents from going off on tangents?
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I’ve noticed that if my instructions leave even a tiny bit of room for interpretation, the agent immediately invents new tasks for itself.
Instead of finishing the main feature, it gets sidetracked optimizing imports and renaming variables.
For daily agent builders, are you using specific rules files, system prompts, or just strict file scoping?
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The thing that's helped me most is to define scope in the task itself: paths it can touch, behavior to change, and what to leave alone. I ask it to check before expanding that work. A rules file helps, but I still review the diff against the original request.