A big job is many small steps
No single prompt finishes a large task at once. Break it into short, checkable steps and you keep quality and overview — and after each step you know whether you are still on the right track.
“Write me a customer letter about the price increase.” A sentence like that sounds like one task, but is really four or five: gathering, deciding, drafting, checking. Hand it over as a single prompt and you often get something that looks plausible but is wrong in one place — and you notice too late which one.
You break large tasks down not because you like being tidy, but because control is otherwise lost. A small step can be checked before the next one builds on it. That is the whole point of decomposition: not more work, but certainty at every point along the way.
Why one big prompt fails
A big request bundles many decisions into one step. Which facts are true, which message matters, which tone fits, which form it takes in the end — all of it is demanded at once. If something is missing at any of these points, the error runs through the whole result without being visible.
The model does not resist: it fills every gap with something plausible and delivers a finished text. The problem is not that it does too little, but that it does too much at once. You can only check such a result as a whole — and that is laborious and unreliable.
The right cut
Decomposing means cutting the task along its natural seams. Each step has exactly one result you can look at and judge before the next begins. Not “make the letter”, but: first the facts, then the core message, then the draft, then the sign-off.
The right cut is the one after which you can ask a clear question: is this correct? If a step cannot be checked at a glance, it is usually still too big. If you spend more time managing a step than working on it, it is too small.
Every step has a sign-off
Decomposition only helps if each step has its own sign-off — a short checkpoint where you decide whether to continue. Without this interim check, control slides back to the end and the advantage is lost.
The sign-off need not be elaborate. Often a yes/no question is enough: are the numbers backed up? Does the core message land? Does the tone fit? Whoever glances once after each step corrects early and cheaply instead of late and expensively.
| Cut | How you recognise it |
|---|---|
| Too big | several results in one step → hard to check, errors stay invisible |
| Cut right | one result, one checkpoint → after the step you know whether it holds |
| Too small | more managing than working → merge neighbouring steps again |
An example: the price-increase letter
Take the customer letter about the price increase. Step one gathers only facts: old price, new price, date, reason. The result is a short, checked list — not a sentence of prose. Only when this list is correct do you continue.
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