From the free book Delta: Closing the Specification Gap (Dhuri, 2026). The PDF is the canonical edition — figures, tables, and code formatting are simplified online.
This book reflects the work of a wide community. The .NET 9 and Java 21 ecosystems are the product of countless engineers — language designers, framework authors, library maintainers, and the writers behind the documentation, blog posts, and conference talks that informed every recipe in Part II. Where the recipes are compilable and idiomatic, it is because of those public foundations. The Hall of Shame appendix is a catalog of teaching prompts I have written to show how each documented anti-pattern manifests in practice. The anti-patterns themselves are widely reported in published work on AI coding tools. Appendix H — the Reverse Review — inverts the usual promptengineering posture. Instead of writing a prompt and judging the output, I asked the AI to critique my prompts: every major prompt in this book, in turn, was passed back through the AI with the question ”what is missing from this prompt that would make the output better?” The technique I call Reverse Review collects those critiques alongside my response to each, in working-notes form. The exercise improved the prompts and the prose in equal measure. And to every on-call engineer who has ever worked through the small hours of the morning because of an AI-generated race condition, a missing constraint, or a quiet precision drift: the patterns in Chapter 6 — the Evidence Brief, the Rubber Duck Upgrade, the Four-Stage Pipeline — ex- ist so that fewer of those nights happen. The published incident reports that informed those patterns are owed a real debt.