My process usually starts as if I’m talking to the owner of a development company. First, we do a system brief. Outcomes, constraints, what the system must achieve. That brief usually goes through one, two, sometimes three iterations until it’s clean. From there, I move into a senior-level architectural discussion between me and the AI. We go back and forth, refining ideas, pressure-testing assumptions, and turning rough concepts into structured thinking. Out of that comes real documentation often 10 to 20 documents in total. Some short, some long. System briefs, architecture outlines, infrastructure designs, domain models, boundaries, ingestion and validation flows, human-in-the-loop reviews if AI is involved, and so on. A key part of this is canon. I always define canonical documents: a system brief canon, sometimes a domain canon, sometimes something more specific. These are single sources of truth. The AI understands what “canonical” means, and when things drift, I can always pull it back with “read the canon first.”All of this happens before I touch an IDE. With human developers, this usually happens implicitly they ask the right questions and create the documentation themselves. AI doesn’t do that. It has no long-term memory. So I create the structure for it. That way, when it starts to hallucinate or wander, I can anchor it instantly instead of re-explaining everything from scratch. Only after that foundation is in place do I move into the IDE and let the agent work. The documentation isn’t overhead it’s the control system. So… what do the rest of you do? Or Am I just being overly fucking anal? One thing I forgot to mention: once I move into the IDE—Visual Studio Code, Antigravity, or both that’s where prompting really matters. I don’t just start prompting and hoping for the best. Before any code happens, I create what I call System Specification Documents. I catalogue them and explicitly require the agent to read every single one in detail. To make sure it hasn’t just skimmed them, I ask the agent to explain the project back to me the purpose, constraints, goals, and boundaries. No coding is allowed at this stage. No output. Just comprehension. If it misunderstood something, or if I missed something, we fix that immediately.

Hi All I hope you dont mind that I type in English. I'm otherwise fluent in Swedish just slow at typing in Swedish. Has anyone figured out how to get NoteBookLM to follow a manuscript? Im a teacher and that would cap off NoteBookLM as a masterful tool if we could hack that