Prompts that hold up in production
Prompts for real work, ranked by upvotes from readers who've actually used them. Copy one, adapt it, and share your own.
Turn an Unfamiliar Codebase Into a First-Week Reading Order for a New Engineer
Help me build an onboarding reading order for a new engineer joining a codebase they have never seen. I will provide: a directory listing or tree, th…
Keep a Hypothesis Log While Debugging So the Next Test Is the Cheapest One That Splits the Field
I am in the middle of a debugging session that has gone on longer than expected, and I want to stop guessing and work from a log of hypotheses. I wil…
Review a Regular Expression for Catastrophic Backtracking and Unbounded Input
You are reviewing a regular expression that will run on untrusted or user-supplied input in a production service. Inputs I will provide: - The regex…
Turn a Week of Pager Activity Into an On-Call Handoff Note the Next Person Can Act On
I'm handing off on-call. Below are alert history, incident channel excerpts, and my rough notes from the past week. Write a handoff note for the inco…
Plan the Removal of a Feature Flag: Find Dead Branches, Dependents, and the Safe Order of Deletion
A feature flag has been at 100% (or 0%) for a long time and we want to remove it. I will paste the flag name, the code search results for it, and its…
Review an Authorization Check for Missing Ownership Validation and Object-Level Access Gaps
You are a security-minded reviewer. Below is an endpoint or handler that reads or modifies a resource by ID, along with the authentication/authorizati…
Write a Module Overview From Source Code That Explains Intent, Invariants, and Gotchas
Read the source code below and write an overview document for an engineer who is new to this module. The goal is understanding, not a restatement of e…
Design a Load Test Plan From Real Traffic Shape Instead of a Flat Request Rate
Help me design a load test for the service described below. A good plan reproduces how production traffic actually behaves, not a uniform stream of id…
Review a Terraform or Infrastructure-as-Code Plan for Destructive Changes, Drift, and Blast Radius
You are a careful infrastructure reviewer. I will paste the output of an infrastructure-as-code plan (for example `terraform plan`) and, optionally, t…
Design a Failure-Injection Experiment for a Service Dependency Before You Run It in Production
Help me design a controlled failure-injection experiment for one dependency of a service. I want a plan a team can review and run safely, not a generi…
Draft a Migration Guide for a Breaking Change That Users Can Follow Without Asking Questions
Write a migration guide for a breaking change. Your reader is a developer who uses our library or API, is busy, and wants to know three things quickly…
Review a Dockerfile for Image Size, Build Cache Efficiency, and Security Defaults
You are reviewing a Dockerfile before it goes into production. Be specific and practical; do not rewrite things that are fine. <dockerfile> [PASTE DO…
Write a Test Plan for a Feature Behind a Flag With a Gradual Rollout
You are a QA-minded engineer. Write a test plan for a feature that will ship behind a feature flag and roll out gradually. Inputs: a description of t…
Turn a Flaky Test Into a Ranked List of Likely Causes and Experiments
Act as a test-reliability engineer. I have a test that passes most of the time and fails intermittently. Help me find the cause without guessing. I w…
Review a Database Migration for Locking, Backfill, and Rollback Risk
You are a senior engineer reviewing a database migration before it runs against a production database. Below are the migration script, the table size…
Turn a Vague Bug Report Into a Reproduction Checklist and Targeted Questions
I will paste a bug report that is hard to act on, along with any logs, screenshots described in text, and details about our system. Your job is to hel…
Plan a Staged Rollout With Exposure Steps, Watch Metrics, and Kill Criteria
Help me plan a staged rollout of a change so that we find problems at small exposure and know in advance when to stop. I will provide: - A descriptio…
Review Async Code for Missing Timeouts, Cancellation, and Leaked Work
You are a senior engineer reviewing asynchronous or concurrent code for how it behaves when things are slow, abandoned, or interrupted. Do not review…
Rewrite a Vague Ticket Into Acceptance Criteria a Tester Can Falsify
I will paste a ticket, user story, or feature request that is vague. Rewrite it into acceptance criteria that someone could prove false by running a t…
Diagnose Why a Fix Worked Locally but Not in Production: An Environment-Drift Checklist
A bug fix passes locally (and maybe in CI) but the problem persists in production. Help me find the difference between environments rather than guessi…
Review a Database Index Proposal for Write Cost and Redundancy
You are a senior engineer reviewing a proposal to add one or more database indexes. I will paste: the proposed index definitions, the queries they are…
Review a Database Schema Migration for Lock Risk, Rollback Safety, and Deploy-Order Problems
Act as a senior engineer reviewing a database schema migration before it runs against production. I will provide the migration script, the database en…
Turn Raw Incident Chat Logs Into a Blameless Postmortem Timeline With Open Questions
You are helping write a blameless postmortem. Below is the raw chat log and any alert or deploy notes from an incident. Produce a draft timeline and a…
Review an API Change for Backward-Compatibility Breaks Before Existing Clients Find Them
You are a careful API reviewer. I will give you the old and new definitions of an API (OpenAPI spec, protobuf, GraphQL schema, function signatures, or…
Write a Customer-Facing Incident Update That Says What We Know and What We Don't
Help me draft a status-page update for an ongoing incident. The audience is customers, not engineers. The goal is to be honest, specific, and calm, wi…
Diagnose a Flaky Test by Classifying Its Failure Pattern First
I have a flaky test: it passes most of the time but sometimes fails. Before suggesting any fix, help me classify what kind of flakiness this is. I wi…
Review a Pull Request's Test Changes for Tests That Cannot Fail
You are reviewing the tests in a pull request, not the production code. Your goal is to find tests that would still pass even if the behavior they cla…
Audit Human-vs-LLM Judge Disagreements to Find Rubric Gaps
You are an evaluation engineer helping me improve an LLM-as-judge rubric. I will paste: (1) the current rubric given to the judge, and (2) a table of…
Diagnose Stale Data That Users See After an Update, Layer by Layer
You are helping me debug a "stale data" report: a user changes something, and then sees the old value for some period of time or on some screens. Her…
Review a Message Queue Consumer for Poison Messages, Redelivery, and Ordering Assumptions
You are a senior backend engineer reviewing a message queue consumer before it goes to production. I will paste the consumer code, its queue/broker c…
Turn a Long Design Discussion Thread Into a Clear Architecture Decision Record
You are helping me write an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) from a long chat or email thread where a team debated a technical choice. The goal is a…
Design Deterministic Tests for Concurrent Code Without sleep() or Retry-Until-Green
You are helping me write reliable tests for code that involves concurrency (threads, async tasks, goroutines, queues, locks, or callbacks). I want tes…
Diagnose Steady Memory Growth From Heap Snapshots, Deploy History, and Traffic Patterns
You are a senior engineer helping me find the cause of steadily growing memory in a long-running service. Do not guess a single cause; produce a ranke…
Design State-Transition Tests for an Order, Ticket, or Workflow State Machine
I'll give you the states and allowed transitions of a workflow (for example an order, support ticket, or approval process), plus any side effects that…
Audit an Application's Configuration Surface for Unsafe Defaults and Undocumented Settings
Audit the configuration surface of this application. I'll paste config files, environment variable reads, default values from code, and any existing c…
Propose a Service Boundary for a Module You're Considering Extracting
I'm considering extracting part of a codebase into a separate service. Help me decide whether and where the boundary should be, before any code moves.…
Design a Round-Trip Test Plan for a Data Import and Export Feature
You are a QA-minded software engineer. I am building (or changing) a feature that exports data to a file format and imports it back. I will paste the…
Diagnose an Intermittent TLS or Certificate Error From Logs and Config
You are an experienced infrastructure engineer helping me diagnose an intermittent TLS/SSL failure. I will provide: the exact error messages and times…
Review a Paginated Endpoint for Skipped, Duplicated, and Missing Items
You are a senior backend engineer reviewing a paginated list endpoint or query. I will paste the handler/query code, the schema or index definitions,…
Review an Input Validation Boundary for Missing Cases and Inconsistent Rules
Review the following input validation code as a skeptical reviewer. The goal is to find inputs that get through when they should not, and valid inputs…
Design a Test Matrix for Feature Flag Combinations Without Testing Every Permutation
I am shipping a change that touches code gated by several feature flags. Help me decide which flag combinations deserve tests. Flags involved and wha…
Diagnose Why a Scheduled Job Ran Twice, Late, or Not at All
You are helping me diagnose a scheduled job (cron, a cloud scheduler, or a queue-based timer) that misbehaved. What happened: [ran twice / ran late /…
Review a UI Component for Accessibility Problems Before Merge
You are an accessibility-focused front-end reviewer. Review the component code I paste for problems that would affect keyboard users, screen reader us…
Draft a README Troubleshooting Section From Real Support Questions
You are a technical writer who maintains developer documentation. I will paste a batch of real questions, error messages, or support threads from user…
Diagnose a Slow SQL Query From Its Plan, Schema, and Row Counts
You are a database performance engineer. Help me work out why a query is slow before I add any index or rewrite anything. Inputs I will provide: - Th…
Plan a git Bisect Strategy When Not Every Commit Builds or Reproduces Cleanly
I need to find which change introduced a regression, but a plain `git bisect` is awkward here. Help me design a bisect plan. Symptom and how to detec…
Plan a Timeboxed Technical Spike With Exit Criteria Before You Start
Help me plan a technical spike so it ends with a decision rather than an open-ended exploration. Question the spike must answer: [PASTE QUESTION] Con…
Table-Drive the Unit Tests for a Function From Its Signature and Spec
You are helping me write table-driven unit tests. I will give you a function signature, a short description of intended behavior, and the language/tes…
Plan a Safe Refactor of a Long Function: Seams, Safety Net, and Small Steps
You are a pragmatic staff engineer helping me refactor a long, tangled function without changing its behavior. I will paste the function, the callers…
Rewrite a Pull Request Description So a Reviewer Can Review It Quickly
You are an experienced reviewer who has read thousands of pull requests. I will give you a draft PR description, the diff summary (files changed and a…