Prompting on AIBussin — AI applications, systems and books

Writing a Task Pi Can Finish

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0100

The most common failure is not a bad model. It is a task that never said what “done” meant. You wrote “clean up the auth module”, Pi spent forty turns, and produced something you now have to review as carefully as writing it yourself.

Do not rely on Pi to ask for approval before acting. quickstart.md says Pi shows each file read, search, command, and edit it performs, and that it does not ask before every tool call. State the task, its scope and its acceptance check explicitly rather than assuming the agent will ask for missing constraints.

Prompt Templates

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0100

The /review you typed in chapter 11 was real — it lives at .pi/prompts/review.md, four lines of frontmatter and three of body. This chapter is about everything that file can do and, just as importantly, what it cannot.

The one-line summary from prompt-templates.md: templates turn Markdown files into reusable / commands, and you want one when you would otherwise retype the same prompt without adding executable behaviour or a larger set of supporting instructions.

Skills

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0100

/review from chapter 12 expands when you invoke it. The problem it solves has a sibling: work that the model should recognise as relevant to a task without you naming a command first. Skill selection is model-driven, not a guaranteed trigger.

That is a skill, and the entire mechanism turns on one field you are tempted to rush.

What a skill actually is

skills.md opens with the definition: skills give Pi specialized instructions and supporting files for a particular kind of work. Pi advertises each eligible skill by name and description. The model may then read its SKILL.md when it considers the skill relevant; Pi does not automatically execute the skill on a matching task.