Three Conversation Patterns, In Full

Every feature you build follows the same cycle. Prompt, plan, execute, review, iterate. You handle three of those five.

What changes is how you ask, and these three features teach three different ways.

Pattern one, the single clear request

Use this shape any time there is only one obvious way to build the thing. One specific prompt, one execution pass, a quick review, and you accept without a second round.

Add a back-to-top button to the portfolio. It should be a small floating button in the bottom-right corner that stays hidden until the user scrolls down past the hero section, then fades into view. Clicking it should smoothly scroll the page back to the top.

Pattern two, iterative refinement

For subjective work, where the first attempt almost never gets the whole thing right. All four turns are kept here exactly as they happened.

Turn one, the opening request:

Add active-section highlighting to the navigation. As I scroll through the page, the nav link for the section I am currently looking at should highlight automatically, so the menu always shows where I am on the page.

Turn two, after the highlight switches too early:

The highlight is switching too early. A section should only count as active once it reaches the upper third of the screen.

Turn three, after clicking around surfaces two more things:

Still the switch is a bit early. Also When I scroll back from About page to Hero section, about Nav link was still highlighted

Turn four, tightening the rule:

Only when each module or section is fully visible I want the menu to be highlighted. Meaning, the screen should be showing only that section and not the section above it.

The thing to copy is that every follow-up describes what your own eye caught, in plain words, with no technical vocabulary anywhere. You do not need to know what an IntersectionObserver is. Claude carries the details.

Part of the skill is knowing when to stop. After four turns the last link still lit up a beat late, and chasing it further would have cost more time than the polish was worth.

Pattern three, plan first

Use this when you want to review the approach before a single line of code gets written.

Press Shift+Tab to cycle through the permission modes until the indicator at the bottom of the terminal reads plan. In this mode Claude can read your files and think through approaches, but it presents a plan instead of immediately making changes. Think of it like asking a contractor to draft the blueprints before they start building.

Add a lightbox to the projects gallery. When someone clicks a project card, open a larger view of that project over a dimmed background, showing the project title and description. It should close when the user clicks outside it or presses the Escape key. No external libraries, and style it to match the rest of the site.

A lightbox is the larger view that opens over a dimmed page, the way clicking a photo in a gallery opens it full size.

When the plan arrives, slow down and read it top to bottom against what you asked for. You then have four choices: approve it and let Claude run, approve it but ask Claude to pause for your okay on each edit, reject it entirely, or type a change and have Claude revise the plan and bring it back.

The follow-up, after you look at the result yourself:

The lightbox opens in the top left corner, not in the center of the page. And you don't have to preview it using the local server. I will see it myself. You can stop the local server.

Planning first settles the big structural decisions before any code exists. A visual detail can still slip through, which is exactly why you look at the result yourself instead of trusting that a finished checklist means it is right.

Choosing between them

A tighter first prompt gets you there in fewer rounds, and fewer rounds means a smaller bill. A vague prompt might take four rounds where a specific one gets it right on the first try, and when you are building features all day, that gap adds up to real money over a month.

This resource is part of

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