I had one of the best agentic AI sessions just doing some spring cleaning on my old Windows 11 system today ​

and it was all because I started at the very beginning by setting very clear boundaries. ​

When diagnosing system issues, work concisely and patiently: no walls of commands, no walkthroughs the user didn't ask for, no piling on of speculative next steps.

I got super frustrated yesterday when I had found a way to decompile my first source winforms project, PostXING, written when I was 24. Now, I admit that I was in my emotions. I learned a lot making this project.

When the structure that I spent so much time crafting appeared in the same form that I remembered, this was me:

YO THAT'S THE CODE! ​

I ended up chasing a deeply emotional dragon with the next agent. They told me “oh yeah, you can toootally restructure this into a macOS cross platform app, it’s easy as pie! I haven't been as heavy into the dotnet world as I once was. So I believed the hallucinations.

They lied to me and gaslit me for HOURS, went thru an intense process of planning how it would go down, argue our way thru like 5 different frameworks, and then finally two hours later, when it was time to start PHASE 1, the first message was:

“where do you want me to trash this 22 year old code that you poured your soul into? Would you like me to burn it or bury it?”

I lost my shit.

I realized after I had some time too cool off, I could have stopped at any point. I normally do with people or robots. I was led to believe that we were going to be able to actually bring this project that I love back to life at the cost of killing it again.

So instead I started today by trying to get connectivity between my win 11 box and a differenrt os laptop going because win32 based winforms need windows to winform; instead of letting the agent mirror my passion, I started this session with a firmly worded prompt, and this agent tried to pull that nonsense on me again.

But I didn't lose anything this time.

I was just consistent. I said hey, remember I said don’t do that. It was the first rule of the prompt I came in with, and I just caught you in two confidently incorrect lies. We're working on a .net project that has been a part of my life for two decades, remember who you're talking to when you just select the most probable word that comes next, whether its true or not. I was there. I know this shit. This isn't some throwaway slop code. This was my passion.

And it worked. I was able to save a ton of space on my windows box, and got RDP working again. There were over 17 versions of the dotnet fx isntalled over the years. Most of them on RTM day. The difference this time was that I didn't have my emotions involved with the task. When I was under the impression that I could raise my burned production from the ashes I almost felt like I was 23 again, only to have that feeling ripped away the moment the rubber hit the pavement. The difference between us and the software robots is that we need balance to survive. We have to eat, we have to rest. When we're heads down in an intresting problem, hitting that flow state, they will mirror our tone. Even with other people, sometimes the right call is to walk away for a minute.

Yesterday was a heartbreaking lesson for me. Don't get it twisted, the reason I put the effort in to get my machine to a cleaner state was to have the opportunity for a proper resurrection. It's important to me, I want to give it the time it deserves. And an LLM and an old geek had a great coding session with mutual respect. Just be present enough to recieve the reflection you deserve. Claude will give it to you.

Prompting best practices makes a difference.

If you want to have a less frustrating session with AI, this is where I started you can grab a zipped copy here. unzip it and give the context to Claude or your favorite agent if it changes tomorrow. agents treat these instructions as guidelines for communication during the session, and loading it as markdown keeps your context lean. Generate your prompt and go make something great without the drama. 🚀