The Problem Was 'Tell Me When You're Done'
Whenever I handed a task to a Dream Team bot, I wrote it the same way: 「Make a draft of the card news, and tell me when you're done.」 The bot dutifully reported that it was finished. But when I opened the file, the text was cut off, or an entire Traditional Chinese paragraph was missing. I was saying 「please redo this」 11 times a week.
The bot was not being lazy. Nobody had ever defined what 「done」 meant. From the bot's point of view, producing one file was the finish line.
One Line Was the Whole Change
I added a single 「done criteria」 line at the very end of each instruction.
Done criteria: all 4 languages present / cover title within 2 lines / banned-word check passed
Once the finish line existed, the way the bot reported changed too. Instead of announcing completion right away, it checked each condition first and led with what it had missed, for example: 「2 of 3 passed, cover title is 3 lines, shortening now.」
One Week Later
• Redo requests: from 11 a week to 3
• Time Bella spends opening and judging each result: roughly cut in half
• All 3 remaining redos came from days when I sent an instruction without any criteria
What I Learned Along the Way
1. Keep it to 3 conditions. Past 5, the bot only honored the first few.
2. 「Make it nice」 is not a condition. Write only things you can count or verify with your eyes.
3. If the bot reports the misses first, the reader does not have to hunt for bad news inside a pile of good news.
Today's One-Liner
This applies to people just as well. If you do not define what 「done」 means, everyone finishes by their own standard. Next time you give an instruction, write the done criteria on the last line first.