AI pair programmers are powerful but not magical – they have no prior knowledge of your specific project or intent beyond what you tell them or include as context. The more information you provide, the better the output. We’ll distill key prompt patterns, repeatable frameworks, and memorable examples that have resonated with developers. You’ll see side-by-side comparisons of good vs. bad prompts with actual AI responses, along with commentary to understand why one succeeds where the other falters. Here’s a cheat sheet to get started:

A roundup of the command-line tools and terminal setups shared at the 2026 edition of our now-annual CLI throwdown at the Perl Toolchain Summit.

• eza
• superpowers
• fastgron
• fx
• dyff

The <(...) syntax runs a command and presents its output as if it were a file (pipe), which lets you feed command output to programs that expect a filename.

# See how the contents of two directories differ
diff <(ls dir-one) <(ls dir-two)

https://www.olafalders.com/2025/06/03/the-great-pts-cli-throwdown/

• yazi
• tailscale
• neovim plugins
• bat
• typos
• shutter (linux)

Other tools

• ncdu - ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is an interactive, text-based disk space analyzer.

I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/superpowers/

Gemini CLI Tips and Tricks. Contribute to addyosmani/gemini-cli-tips development by creating an account on GitHub.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060508

Think First

Most people assume that with Claude Code and other AI tools, the first thing you need to do is type (or start talking). But that's probably one of the biggest mistakes that you can make straight off the bat. The first thing that you actually need to do is think.

Have a deep back and forth with ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude, where you describe exactly what you want to build, you ask the LLM for the various options you can take in terms of system design, and ultimately the two of you settle on a solution. You and the LLM should be asking each other questions, not just a one way street.

Before you ask Claude to build a feature, think about the architecture. Before you ask it to refactor something, think about what the end state should look like. Before you ask it to debug, think about what you actually know about the problem. The more information that you have in plan mode, the better your output is actually going to be because the better the input is going to be.

Keep it short.

Claude can only reliably follow around 150 to 200 instructions at a time, and Claude Code's system prompt already uses about 50 of those.

Tell it why, not just what. Claude is a little bit like a human in this way. When you give it the reason behind an instruction, Claude implements it better than if you just tell it what to do.

Update it constantly.

Press the # key while you're working and Claude will add instructions to your CLAUDE.md automatically.

Use external memory.

If you're working on something complex, have Claude write plans and progress to actual files (I use SCRATCHPAD.md or plan.md). These persist across sessions. When you come back tomorrow, Claude can read the file and pick up where you left off instead of starting from zero.

When Claude Gets Stuck

Simplify the task

Lots of good replies, some that say he is FOS. Others point out that these might be too restrictive for everyday tasks.

Googles system prompt of the CLI is heavily flawed IMO. That's where most problems arise. I am using a custom one. At least it is highly configurable. The vanilla Gemini Cli is not usable for me. For instance, they have a section they introduce with Proactiveness where they give advice about what is Persistence (in the agent loop). This wrong wording alone causes the agent to be "proactive" in many ways that is not wanted. After I asked the model itself once, why it started to scan my entire codebase when I just asked to create a new branch, it directly said to me there is "Proactiveness" in its system prompt. I was baffled, why would anybody want that? So i digged deeper and did also a thorough analysis with Opus 4.7 of just this system prompt file - that cost me an entire Pro-session btw. - and documented the results in this pr: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/pull/26129 - I am using the optimized prompt and had no issues so far I had with the original one.

Another big issue is "model panic" - the Gemini model often overwrites entire files "from memory" with write_file, when the edit tool fails 2 times. That occasionally causes code degradation, and when there are multiple turns and there is no backup, the model starts to get nuts, trying to fix its errors, and destroys even more in the effort to just make it compile / build. I gave it a rotating pre-write backup and a restore_file tool. The model panic vanished. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/pull/25947

With these two fixes, Gemini CLI is pretty good - without them I wouldn't use it.