Split a Task at Its Natural Seams, Not Arbitrarily

A chaining principle: break a large task into steps at its natural seams — points where the job genuinely changes, like extract → analyse → draft → refine — so each prompt does one thing well and hands a clean result to the next.

A single mega-prompt asks Claude to research, decide, and write all at once, and quality sags because attention is split and errors compound silently. Splitting at real boundaries gives each step a focused job the model can do well, makes each intermediate result inspectable (you catch a bad extraction before it poisons the draft), and lets you rerun one weak step without redoing everything. The trick is cutting where the work actually changes, not into arbitrary equal chunks.

Multi-stage work — research-then-write, analyse-then-recommend, transform-then-validate — and anything you'll run repeatedly and want to be reliable.

Simple tasks a single good prompt handles fine. Over-chaining a two-line request adds latency and coordination cost for no quality gain.

I need to <big task>. Before doing it, propose how to break it into a chain of steps at natural boundaries — where the job genuinely changes. For each step: its one job, its input, and its output. Keep it to the fewest steps that keep each one clean. Then we'll run them one at a time.

To turn interview notes into a report, the chain is: (1) extract every claim with its source, (2) cluster into themes, (3) draft the report from the themes, (4) tighten. You catch a miscluster at step 2 instead of discovering it in a finished report.

Add a validation step between stages — 'check this extraction is complete and faithful before we build on it' — so errors are caught at the seam rather than carried downstream where they're expensive to trace.

• Cutting into arbitrary equal chunks instead of at real boundaries, so steps have muddled jobs.
• Chaining a task that a single prompt would handle better in one pass.
• Not inspecting intermediate outputs, which throws away the main benefit of chaining.