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The first prompt of a new project is the most important one — it sets the schema, the auth model, the page structure, and the overall shape. Get it close, and the next 50 prompts go fast. Get it wrong, and you’ll fight the foundation for hours.

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The four things to include

What it is

A user-facing one-line summary. “A team task tracker.” Not “an internal tool with multiple roles and complex permissions.”

Who uses it

Roles and how they differ. “Admins invite members; members create tasks; everyone sees their team’s tasks.”

What it stores

The nouns. Names matter. “Users have a team. Teams have tasks. Tasks have a title, due date, priority, and assignee.”

What's special

Anything not obvious. “Real-time”, “needs to scale to 10k users”, “must work offline”, “uses Stripe Connect.”

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Worked examples

This prompt nails all four things. Plan mode produces a clean foundation in seconds. Same structure: what, who, data, what’s special (Stripe Connect).

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When to use Plan mode for the first prompt

Always. The first prompt is where misreads are most expensive. Plan mode catches them before any code is written. See Plan mode.

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What to leave out

❌ Implementation details

“Use TanStack Query for caching.” vly already has the right patterns; let it pick.

❌ Color schemes and exact spacing

“Use #6D28D9 violet on the buttons.” Defer this to a later prompt; first prompt is about structure.

❌ Edge cases up front

“What if the same user tries to invite themselves twice?” Worry about it later. Get the happy path right first.

❌ Optimization

“Pre-fetch the next page of results.” Iterate on this once you have a working app.

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Common shapes worth knowing

“A list of {things}. Each {thing} has {fields}. Users can create, edit, delete. Filter by {field}.”
For full prompts of each shape, see the Cookbook.

Five-layer method

The framework, applied beyond first prompts.

Prompt library

30+ tested templates.

Plan mode

Always use it for first prompts.
Last modified on April 18, 2026