The kickoff prompt

My first prompt is long enough that I saved it as a Raycast snippet. Three keystrokes expands into the full Claude Code kickoff: research deeply, plan in phases, then fan the work out to subagents.

The rest changes with the job. I give the agent an outcome, one user action, a definition of done, and any constraints it can’t discover in the repo. Then it reads the nearby code and docs before it proposes anything.

The plan is my first review. I correct the wrong assumptions, cut work, and move the phases around before any code exists. Once it starts building, my prompts get much shorter: keep this, remove that, open the page, run the check.

Types, lint, git, logs, and repo instructions hold the context between those prompts. If I have to explain the whole job again, something went wrong in the plan.

Read the long version: Ship fast or die