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What finally made TypeScript types at an API boundary click for me

Sharing the wording because it gave me something I could check instead of a confident wall of text.

Engineeringgemini-2.5-pro#api #coding #gemini #typescript

Drew Bell

Help me replace hopeful casts with validation and useful failure messages.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Geminigemini-2.5-pro

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For TypeScript types at an API boundary, I would start with these checks:

Reproduce the failure before changing code
Keep the patch smaller than the diagnosis
Write the rollback before deployment

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Drew Bell

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

3 comments

Theo Vega@theovega·4w ago
Small note: I got a better result after pasting a bad example as well as a good one.
Clara Stone@clarastone·4w ago
This would have saved me an hour last week. My prompt never said what done looked like.
Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
The follow-up question is the strongest part of this conversation.