I asked Claude to add pagination to a product list. Response in 30 seconds: clean, functional, complete. And completely disconnected from the rest of the app. Wrong pagination component (we already had one), invented styles, existing filters broken. Technically correct. Unusable as-is.
The problem wasn't the AI — it was my prompt. I wrote: "Add pagination to this list." That's exactly what it did. Nothing more, nothing less.
Current models (Claude 4.x, GPT-4o) have dropped the "infer intent" behavior. They take prompts literally. That's progress overall, but it fundamentally changes how you need to prompt for code. A good code prompt isn't about tricks — it's about giving the AI the same context you'd give a junior dev joining the project.
I tested and scored dozens of formulations across the four most common coding tasks. Here's what actually works.
The structure that applies to everything
