My father was a career Army Colonel. The best prompting advice I know, I got from him decades before prompts existed.
It’s called commander’s intent. You don’t script a mission step by step — the plan dies on first contact anyway. You state the outcome, the constraints, and why it matters. Then the people executing can make a thousand small decisions you never anticipated and still land where you needed them to.
That’s how I work with AI. I don’t write instructions like a recipe. I write intent: here’s the outcome, here’s what’s off-limits, here’s why it matters and who it’s for. Then I let the model handle first contact — the edge cases I didn’t predict — because it knows what it’s aiming at.
Step-scripted prompts break the moment reality deviates from the script. Intent survives contact.
The Army figured out delegation long before the AI industry did: autonomy isn’t the absence of direction. It’s direction good enough to survive without you.