Steering Mid-Flight

“Wrong” rarely announces itself with an error. Long before the code fails to run, there are signals — if you are watching for them rather than waiting for a red terminal to tell you.

Every agent-style tool lets you stop it mid-run — usually Escape or Ctrl+C. Use it the moment you see the approach is wrong, not after.

The instinct to wait comes from conversational politeness that does not apply here. There is nobody to offend, and every additional file it touches is another thing you will need to review or revert.

Stop — you are editing the wrong file. The cart total iscalculated in src/lib/pricing.ts, not in the component.Start again there.

“No, that’s wrong” gives the model nothing to work with. It will try a different guess, which is as likely to be wrong as the first. Say what was wrong and what you want instead.

1. 1
   Weak

   “That's not right, try again.”

2. 2
   Better

   “You used a global variable for the theme. Use React context instead, like ThemeProvider already does in src/app/providers.tsx.”

The second version costs ten more seconds and removes an entire round trip. It also removes the failure mode where the model cycles through three wrong approaches because it never learned which dimension it got wrong.

You do not have to accept a change to learn from it. Reading a rejected diff often tells you the prompt was ambiguous before you rewrite it.

This is the most useful habit in the chapter. If two consecutive attempts fail to fix the same problem, stop prompting. Do not send a third.

Two failures almost always mean the model is missing context rather than lacking ability, and a third prompt into the same hole produces a third variation of the same misunderstanding — often while adding new damage on top.

What that looks like in practice, on a real bug:

Long threads accumulate wrong turns. Once a conversation contains three rejected approaches, those rejections are still in the context — the model is now steering around its own past mistakes rather than solving your problem cleanly.

Starting fresh feels like losing progress. It is not: your code is on disk, and a new conversation with one good prompt that describes the current state will usually beat twenty messages of accumulated correction.

Fresh start. The cart total in src/lib/pricing.ts double-countsdiscounts when an item has both a percentage and a fixeddiscount. Read that file and the tests in pricing.test.ts,then explain the cause before fixing anything.