In the Era of AI Dominance, Does It Still Make Sense to Write Prompts to Yourself?
It started innocently. A complex refactoring task loomed ahead—one of those multifile, semantically delicate, potentially hair-pulling situations that could ripple across three services and two time zones worth of code ownership. Naturally, like any respectable developer in 2025, I turned to my trusty assistant: ChatGPT. But before I could hit Enter, I found myself writing out the prompt… in excruciating detail. The context, the goal, the edge cases, the internal trade-offs, the modules involved, the caveats, the naming conventions, the rollback strategy. Twenty minutes in, I stopped. I looked at the prompt. I looked at my terminal. And then I just did it myself. The Accidental Clarity of Prompting Here lies the strange new ritual of modern software development: articulating a problem so clearly that it becomes obvious how to solve it before the AI has a chance to reply. Is this a failure of AI? Absolutely not. Is it a failure of you? Also no. (Unless you count being c...