Jeffrey Emanuel@doodlestein
I like to make sure that I'm making some forward progress on every one of my active projects each day, even when I'm too busy to spend real mental bandwidth on all of them every single day.
So I've come up with a few prompts that I use a lot with the agents so they're always doing some level of polishing/checking/fixing and general improvement.
The models are basically good enough now, and I have enough unit tests and end-to-end integration tests, that I'm not too worried about them going rogue and making big mistakes. Plus, if one of them did, the other agents would probably catch it and fix it themselves.
Some common ones I use are presented here:
"I want you to sort of randomly explore the code files in this project, choosing code files to deeply investigate and understand and trace their functionality and execution flows through the related code files which they import or which they are imported by. Once you understand the purpose of the code in the larger context of the workflows, I want you to do a super careful, methodical, and critical check with "fresh eyes" to find any obvious bugs, problems, errors, issues, silly mistakes, etc. and then systematically and meticulously and intelligently correct them. Be sure to comply with ALL rules in AGENTS dot md."
and
"Ok can you now turn your attention to reviewing the code written by your fellow agents and checking for any issues, bugs, errors, problems, inefficiencies, security problems, reliability issues, etc. and carefully diagnose their underlying root causes using first-principle analysis and then fix or revise them if necessary? Don't restrict yourself to the latest commits, cast a wider net and go super deep! Use ultrathink."
When I'm feeling dissatisfied with a project but don't have the energy to actually grapple with things directly, I will do one of these (but only with Opus 4.5 or now GPT 5.2 with extra high thinking effort):
"Great, now I want you to super carefully scrutinize every aspect of the application workflow and implementation and look for things that just seem sub-optimal or even wrong/mistaken to you, things that could very obviously be improved from a user-friendliness and intuitiveness standpoint, places where our UI/UX could be improved and polished to be slicker, more visually appealing, and more premium feeling and just ultra high-quality, like Stripe-level apps."
You can even follow that one up in Codex by queueing up these messages, which will apply to the many suggestions it came up with for improving the project:
"OK so please take ALL of that and elaborate on it more and then create a comprehensive and granular set of beads for all this with tasks, subtasks, and dependency structure overlaid, with detailed comments so that the whole thing is totally self-contained and self-documenting (including relevant background, reasoning/justification, considerations, etc.-- anything we'd want our "future self" to know about the goals and intentions and thought process and how it serves the over-arching goals of the project.)"
followed by:
"Check over each bead super carefully-- are you sure it makes sense? Is it optimal? Could we change anything to make the system work better for users? If so, revise the beads. It's a lot easier and faster to operate in "plan space" before we start implementing these things!"
And then:
"OK, so start systematically and methodically and meticulously and diligently executing those remaining beads tasks that you created in the optimal logical order! Don't forget to mark beads as you work on them."
And then a couple "proceed" messages, then a final:
"Great, now I want you to carefully read over all of the new code you just wrote and other existing code you just modified with "fresh eyes" looking super carefully for any obvious bugs, errors, problems, issues, confusion, etc. Carefully fix anything you uncover."
Note that these are all entered up front and go into a queue of messages which codex processes one at a time when it finished the previous one; unfortunately, this workflow doesn't work with Claude Code because it interrupts the agent with your follow up messages.
Anyway, then you can come back 3+ hours later to see the incredible amount of work done autonomously for you. This works way better now with GPT 5.2 with extra effort.
Finally, have Claude commit it all for you with this:
"Now, based on your knowledge of the project, commit all changed files now in a series of logically connected groupings with super detailed commit messages for each and then push. Take your time to do it right. Don't edit the code at all. Don't commit obviously ephemeral files. Use ultrathink."
I do this every day, multiple times a day, for like 7+ projects now, and keep 3 machines busy constantly (and all my various subscriptions, although I'll have to add even more soon at this rate).
Oh yeah, and each of these blurbs takes under a second to do with a single button press using my little command palette gizmo (plus its new little brother version I got for a second machine and which only costs $60 on Temu!), see pics.
