Ask for the note you would need in six months: what this does, how to run it, what breaks it, and which decisions were deliberate. Ask at the end of the session, while the context still exists. A week later the agent knows no more than you do.
The prompt
Write a short note for someone who has never seen this: what it does, how to run it locally, what environment variables it needs, what breaks it, and which decisions here were deliberate rather than accidental.
| When to use it | At the end of any session that produced something you will come back to. Before you close the window. |
|---|---|
| Why it is worded that way | The last clause is the valuable one. Anyone can re-derive what the code does by reading it; nobody can re-derive why it was done that way. Deliberate-versus-accidental is exactly the distinction that disappears overnight, and it is what stops a future change from undoing a decision that had a reason. |
Ask while the session is still open
The agent's understanding of what it built exists inside the conversation. A new session reads the same code you would and reconstructs the same guesses. Five minutes now replaces an hour later.
Keep it next to the code
In the repository, not in a note-taking app. Documentation that lives somewhere else goes stale silently, because nothing reminds you it exists when the code changes.
The version that pays for itself
"What breaks it." Every project has two or three things that look optional and are not. Written down once, they stop being the thing you rediscover at the worst moment.
The Operator Prompt Pack
This is one of 60 prompts, from the phase "Deploy and hand over". The pack has the rest, each with the same reasoning underneath, plus the research they are built on and a house-rules file you paste in once.
Tools this applies to
| Tool | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | An AI agent in your terminal that reads your files, edits them, runs commands and deploys. | ~€17–20/mo |
| GitHub | Version control. Your restore point when an hour of building goes wrong. | Free |
| Cursor | A code editor with AI. The step between browser builder and terminal. | ~$20/mo |
Every tool has its own page with what it costs and who should skip it. Some links are affiliate links.
More prompts like this
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The prompt that gets a plan before any code
How do you make an AI coding agent plan the work before it starts writing code?
The prompt for deciding what to charge
How do you decide what to charge for software you built yourself?