draw-the-owl
Draw the Owl
A pattern for building features with agents, from Mitchell Hashimoto. The core insight: the binding constraint on agent feature work is not whether the code runs, it's whether a human can review it. A diff you cannot review is a diff you cannot trust, no matter how green the tests are. So the loop optimizes for shrinking changes below your review-ability threshold rather than for getting a working feature in one shot.
The name is the "draw the owl" meme — step 1: draw two circles; step 2: draw the rest of the owl. The first prompt is deliberately that underspecified: ask for the whole feature, loosely guided, and expect garbage. The garbage is not the deliverable. It is reconnaissance — it reveals the true shape of the problem so you can carve it into pieces worth reviewing.