The best prompt I know in Claude Code is two words: “Interview me”.
Claude isn’t the bottleneck. Your taste (or the lack of clarity around it) is.
In Plan Mode, “Interview me” forces decisions before code gets written. It makes you confront tradeoffs. No Skills or fancy tooling required. Claude may ask clarifying questions in Plan Mode anyways, but “Interview me” changes the mode from occasional clarification to sustained interrogation. Sometimes 10–15 questions in a row.
Some tradeoffs will be around engineering, and some will be on design or UX. But most importantly, it will often nudge you to make critical decisions around product direction, and guide you to decide on what NOT to do. For better or worse, it brings out the core engineer, designer, and PM in you.
If you give Claude vague or underspecified prompts and complain that it looks generic or that it missed the mark, that is on you.
I keep coming back to the same analogy of treating Claude Code as a bright and motivated engineer. You’re the manager. If your smart, accomplished engineer delivers something that is off, the main responsibility is on the manager. You didn’t provide enough business context or enough product vision that the engineer can do his or her job properly.
The human engineers reporting to you are not mind readers. Neither is Claude. LLMs are trained on human language, and thus mirror human thought and human behavior. Clarity is a best management practice for both humans and Claude.
(see the original Linkedin Post)