How to Structure Your Prompts for AI Coding Assistants When Building Complex Features

AI coding assistants perform well on small, bounded tasks. Ask for a utility function with clear inputs and outputs, and you will usually get something close to what you need. The challenge is complex features - multi-step implementations that span multiple components, involve existing infrastructure, and require coordination across parts of the codebase the model has not seen. For complex features, the prompting approach that works for simple tasks breaks down. The model does not have enough co