On 8 July I typed this. I am not going to tidy it up:
"please give me exact what to do, what are the env variables. pleasepleaseplease stop assuming stuff, make that a law to give me exact prompts, this is a massive massive waste of time and tokens, that i have to keep asking for very specific instructions, it is a massive bottle neck of your causing"
And a few hours later, in case it had not landed:
"right so in future you give me the whole command to copy, this is LAW."
The pattern that produced that, and it will be familiar to anyone who has done this for more than a fortnight, goes like this. You ask how to do something. You get an answer that is ninety percent of the answer. It says run the migration, or set the environment variable, or add the record. It does not say the exact command, or the exact variable name, or exactly where.
So you ask again. You get another ninety percent. Then you go and find out yourself, which is what you were trying to avoid, and it has cost you forty minutes and a chunk of your attention for the day.
Each individual gap is small. That is precisely why it is expensive. Small enough that querying it feels petty, so you absorb it, and you absorb it fifteen times a day.
The underlying problem is an assumption about who you are. The model has decided you know where your env file lives, that you will infer the variable name from context, that "point the DNS at the new host" is a complete instruction. Sometimes that is right. When it is wrong it is not slightly wrong, it is a dead stop, and the machine has no way of knowing which case it is in.
So I made it a law, in those words, and put it in the project memory. If you need me to do something, give me the whole thing. The entire command, copy-pasteable. The exact variable name and the exact value. Where the file is. Not the shape of the instruction, the instruction.
Two things I did not expect.
The first is that it made the sessions shorter, not longer. Precise instructions are more tokens on the way out and vastly fewer on the way back, because there is no round of clarification, no failed attempt, no paste of an error message.
The second is that it changed how I write my own tickets. Once I had insisted on exactness in one direction it became obvious how vague I was being in the other. "Fix the nav" is the same category of failure as "set the environment variable."
If you take one thing from this series, this is the cheapest to adopt and it pays back the same week. Tell it that partial instructions are not acceptable, and hold the line the first three times.
I still have to remind it. On 8 July, asking for a fix, I added "remember to follow the coding laws" and then, in brackets, "(hate that i have to remind you)."
Next: how the ticket system became the memory.