Plan review: 5 methods in one message

Re-analyze this from first principles and run an adversarial review of the current plan. Core mechanisms must be validated with ablation tests. Follow Occam's razor in the design, and keep the code highly cohesive and loosely coupled.

An engineer two months into a big tech job leans on 5 very short prompts and calls them the model’s thinking shortcuts. Each one names a single method. The model saw plenty of papers and code on these methods in training, so naming one is often enough.

• When an API is slow and the plan is already “add a Redis cache,” have it work from first principles to find whether the time goes to SQL, the network or repeated work.
• When you review a plan or code, ask for an adversarial review that hunts for counterexamples to the core assumptions.
• If you shipped three optimizations at once and the endpoint got faster, have it design an ablation test that pulls them apart. It might turn out the index alone took it from 800ms to 120ms.
• When the agent piles up Kafka, Redis and distributed locks, ask it to review the design with Occam’s razor.
• When a service class hits 2,000 lines, ask it to review the responsibility boundaries for high cohesion and low coupling.

In Claude Code, once Opus 5.5 has written the plan and before it touches any code, send this as your next message.