The Universal Kickoff Prompt
A single prompt that runs a 30-minute project-planning session before any AI work begins — scope, decomposition, sequencing, verification, and recovery in one pass — so you don't hand AI a 200-hour job as one over-prompt.
The kickoff prompt runs a thirty-minute project-planning session before any AI work happens — scope, chunks, sequence, verification, and recovery, in one pass. It exists because the most common failure in professional AI work is the over-prompt: handing AI a two-hundred-hour job as one six-paragraph request, getting output that looks finished and can’t be trusted anywhere. Run this instead, once, at the start of anything bigger than a question.
Pair it with the Five Scoping Questions to set the AI/human boundary first, then run any tool it surfaces through Tool, Toy, or Trash?. Keep skipping the planning? Install the version that won’t let you — The Kickoff skill runs the same five questions as standing behavior every time.
The Universal Kickoff Prompt
I'm starting a project. Before any work happens, help me run
through five planning questions.
1. SCOPE. The project is [one-sentence description]. The
deliverable is [specific output]. The quality bar is [how
I'll know it's good enough]. Given that, what's reliably in
AI's range here and what's outside it? Where should I be
doing the work myself?
2. DECOMPOSITION. Break the in-scope AI work into chunks small
enough that each chunk's output can be verified in under
five minutes. List the chunks.
3. SEQUENCING. Which chunks depend on which? Which can run in
parallel? Sketch the dependency order.
4. VERIFICATION. For each chunk, name how I'll verify the
output before moving on. Be specific.
5. RECOVERY. For each chunk, name the most likely failure mode
and the recovery move. If a chunk fails twice in a row,
what's the rescope plan?
Produce this as a structured project plan I can use to run
the work.
Why it works It externalizes the planning your brain skips at 11pm. The five questions are the five disciplines of running AI projects — and being asked them is what produces the discipline, even when the AI's specific suggestions need pushback. The verification question alone earns the thirty minutes: naming how you'll check each piece before it runs is the difference between catching errors at the source and excavating them from three layers of work built on top.
Then what Don't accept the plan raw — refine it once; you know things about the work the AI doesn't. Then pin the plan to the top of your working doc, run chunk one, and verify it before chunk two exists. When a chunk fails twice, that's the two-strike rule — refactor, don't rerun a third time. And if planning is the step you keep skipping, install the version that won't let you: The Kickoff skill runs the same five questions as standing behavior — the difference is who holds the discipline.
These prompts put the framework from Before You Build in your hands. More about the book →
Frequently asked questions
What is the universal kickoff prompt?
It's a single prompt that runs a 30-minute planning session before any AI work — walking scope, decomposition, sequencing, verification, and recovery in one pass, so a big job never gets handed to AI as one six-paragraph over-prompt.
Why plan before prompting?
The most common failure in professional AI work is the over-prompt: handing AI a huge job as one request and getting output that looks finished but can't be trusted. Planning first names how you'll verify each chunk before you build more work on top of it.