Asking Better Questions, Getting Better Code?

🎯 Lesson Objective:

Teach learners how to write more effective prompts that help AI return cleaner, more accurate code — and explain its decisions. This skill sets the tone for everything they’ll do in the course.

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👋 Lesson Intro:

The quality of your question = the quality of your results.

Whether you’re debugging a nasty function or scaffolding a new React component, how you ask makes all the difference. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to craft prompts that make AI your most helpful collaborator — not a confusing code printer.

Prompting isn’t just about getting code — it’s about getting insight, learning patterns, and shaping how the AI thinks with you.

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🧩 Key Concepts Covered:

1. What Is a “Good” Developer Prompt?

• A prompt that:
  • Includes context (what you’re building, what tech stack you’re using)
  • Is specific about what you want (generate, fix, explain, refactor?)
  • Includes constraints (use Tailwind, keep it async, avoid jQuery, etc.)
• Bad prompt: “Write a login page.”
  Good prompt:
  “Create a responsive login form in React with Tailwind CSS. Include email + password fields, and error validation.”

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2. Prompt Formulas That Work

✅ The Debugger Prompt

“Here’s some code that’s breaking — can you explain why this error is happening and how to fix it?”

✅ The Rewriter Prompt

“Make this more readable but keep it efficient. Add comments so I can understand it better.”

✅ The Generator Prompt

“Give me a boilerplate setup for a Next.js app that uses Prisma and Tailwind.”

✅ The Comparison Prompt

“Compare this implementation to using async/await — which is cleaner and why?”

✅ The Teach-Me Prompt

“Explain what this code does like I’m familiar with JS but not with Promises.”

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🛠️ Pro Tip: Prompt Stacking

Chain your prompts instead of asking for everything at once.

🔁 Example:

1. “Generate the base HTML/CSS for a pricing table.”
2. “Now convert that to React components.”
3. “Now add Tailwind and responsive layout.”

This makes your sessions modular and easier to learn from.

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🤖 Practice Activity: Prompt Remix

Use ChatGPT or Cursor with this exercise:

Starter Prompt:

“Write a function that checks if a string is a palindrome.”

Now remix it:

• Ask it to add comments line-by-line.
• Ask it to rewrite in a different language (Python → JS or vice versa).
• Ask: “How would this break if input is not a string?”
• Ask: “What test cases should I write for this function?”

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📌 Big Takeaway:

Prompting is a core developer skill in 2025.
The better you are at describing what you want, the faster and smarter your AI assistant becomes.

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📝 Assignment: AI Prompt Playground

Choose a small function or feature you’ve built before. Then:

1. Write 3 different prompts to either:
   • Generate it
   • Refactor it
   • Explain it
2. Compare the outputs.
3. Document what you learned about prompt clarity, detail, and tone.

📥 Submit:

• The 3 prompts + AI responses
• A 3–5 sentence reflection on which one worked best and why