Coding agents got much better. Our prompts often didn't or we use inefficient chat messages. In 2026, I don't try to find magical sentences that somehow make the model smarter. I try to make the task hard to misunderstand, hard to game, and easy to verify . After years of using LLMs on real codebases, these are the ten prompting patterns I keep coming back to. 1. Call It a "First Draft" and Attack It Instead of Is this implementation correct? ...