Establish your project's governing principles and development guidelines. This constitution will guide all subsequent development phases.

Define code quality standards, testing requirements, user experience guidelines, performance targets, and any organizational constraints.

This becomes the foundation that all specifications, plans, and implementations must adhere to.

You provide a high-level description of what you're building and why, and the coding agent generates a detailed specification. This isn't about technical stacks or app design. It's about user journeys, experiences, and what success looks like.

Who will use this? What problem does it solve for them? How will they interact with it? What outcomes matter?

Think of it as mapping the user experience you want to create, and letting the coding agent flesh out the details. Crucially, this becomes a living artifact that evolves as you learn more about your users and their needs.

Now you get technical. In this phase, you provide the coding agent with your desired stack, architecture, and constraints, and the coding agent generates a comprehensive technical plan.

If your company standardizes on certain technologies, this is where you say so. If you're integrating with legacy systems, have compliance requirements, or have performance targets you need to hit … all of that goes here.

You can also ask for multiple plan variations to compare and contrast different approaches. If you make your internal docs available to the coding agent, it can integrate your architectural patterns and standards directly into the plan.

After all, a coding agent needs to understand the rules of the game before it starts playing.

The coding agent takes the spec and the plan and breaks them down into actual work. It generates small, reviewable chunks that each solve a specific piece of the puzzle.

Each task should be something you can implement and test in isolation; this is crucial because it gives the coding agent a way to validate its work and stay on track, almost like a test-driven development process for your AI agent.

Instead of "build authentication," you get concrete tasks like "create a user registration endpoint that validates email format."

Your coding agent tackles the tasks one by one (or in parallel, where applicable). But here's what's different: instead of reviewing thousand-line code dumps, you, the developer, review focused changes that solve specific problems.

The coding agent knows what it's supposed to build because the specification told it. It knows how to build it because the plan told it. And it knows exactly what to work on because the task told it.