Take it apart before you ask
Why one-shot prompts fail at scale
An assistant asked to produce a full deliverable in one prompt usually returns something competent and generic. The reason is not laziness; it is that complex work has internal seams the assistant cannot see from the brief alone. Research, structure, drafting, editing, formatting — each calls for a different kind of attention and a different kind of input. Bundling all of them into one request forces the assistant to compromise on each. The output reads acceptably and serves nothing well. The remedy is older than the assistant: take the work apart and run each piece in turn.
Decomposition is a craft, not a checklist
The discipline of breaking work into steps benefits from being treated as a craft. A serviceable starting move is to ask, for any unfamiliar piece of work, what a thoughtful person would do first, second, and third, and to write the steps down before any tool is involved. The steps that emerge are usually fewer than the worker expected and longer than they would have liked. That is the right shape. A decomposition with twenty fine-grained steps is harder to use than one with five well-chosen ones; each step in a good decomposition is a unit of work that an assistant or a person could complete in one focused effort.
Which sub-tasks an assistant handles well
Once the work is broken down, the categories an assistant is good at become obvious. Drafting from a clear brief. Reformatting between known structures. Summarising long material into a target length. Comparing two artefacts for inconsistency. Performing the same routine across many inputs. The categories an assistant handles less well are equally recognisable. Original taste calls. Decisions under genuine ambiguity. Anything requiring lived experience the assistant does not have. The decomposition step is where each piece of work gets routed to the right kind of attention, and the routing is what produces the result that a one-shot prompt could not.
Decomposition as the route to compounding
There is a second reason to take work apart that has nothing to do with the immediate result. A decomposed piece of work is one whose sub-steps can be reused. Next time a similar task arrives, the steps are already known, the prompts for each step can be lifted from the previous run, and the only new thinking is the part that genuinely differs. A single decomposition done well becomes the seed of a saved routine — what later lessons will call a skill — and from that point on the same kind of work gets faster every time it is done. Without decomposition there is nothing to save.
Pick a piece of work you produce regularly that you wish were easier. Without thinking about a tool, can you list the sub-steps in the order you actually perform them?