Proverbs
Spec by artifact
Paste the real ticket, the real constraint, the real numbers. A paraphrase is already a design error.
A steward's raw material is other people's words: tickets, contracts, complaints, threads. The first law of handling them with a machine is to hand over the artifact itself, not your summary of it. A paraphrase is already a design decision, and it throws away exactly the details that decide: the odd clause, the hedged sentence, the number that doesn't match. Paste the real thing and let the analysis start from evidence.
This is doubly true for anything legal or contractual, where the machine's close reading is only as good as the text it was given. A clause described from memory gets a plausible answer about a document that doesn't exist. The verbatim clause gets a real answer, sometimes a reassuring one, sometimes the catch you would have signed past.
How to practice it
Paste, don't paraphrase.
The ticket, the clause, the email thread, the error text: verbatim in. Your summary is a lossy compression of the part that matters.
Include the numbers raw.
Real figures anchor real analysis. Rounded recollections produce confident arithmetic about a fiction.
Mark what's yours.
Separate the artifact from your commentary so the machine knows which is evidence and which is spin.
Ask against the text.
Point questions at the pasted artifact: what does this clause commit me to, what is missing from this ticket, what changed between these two.
Deep scripture: Codeuteronomy I — The request must be bounded; the unscoped will be invented