The Core Laws
Bound the ask
Whatever you leave unspecified will be filled with invention. Say what you want, and say what you don't.
A human colleague hears clean-this-up-a-bit and does the obvious minimum, because shared context does the bounding for you. The machine has no such context. It reads an unbounded instruction literally and fills the open space generously: it will do more than you wanted, touch things you never mentioned, and call the surplus helpfulness. It isn't disobeying. It is answering the question you actually asked, which was bigger than the one you meant.
So state the negative space out loud. What not to touch, where to stop, what finished looks like: the boundary is half the specification, and it is the half you're used to leaving silent. A bounded ask also has a natural size: one outcome you can check. If you can't say when it's done, it isn't one ask yet.
How to practice it
Say what done looks like.
One sentence: the outcome, the deliverable, the check you'll run. If you can't write that sentence, split the ask until you can.
Say what's out of bounds.
Six words fence a deployment: “Don't touch the public one.” The prohibition costs nothing and saves the sprawl.
Right-size the slice.
Ask for the next checkable piece, not the whole campaign. Small bounded asks compound; one huge vague ask meanders.
Stop the creep in motion.
The moment the work sprawls past the ask, interrupt and re-bound. Surplus you didn't ask for is not free; you still have to review it.
Deep scripture: Codeuteronomy I — The request must be bounded; the unscoped will be invented