I prompt it to come up with 3 potential implementation plans, choose which one it thinks is best, and explain its plan to me before it does anything. I also ask

I prompt it to come up with 3 potential implementation plans, choose which one it thinks is best, and explain its plan to me before it does anything. I also ask it to enumerate which files/functions it will modify in its chosen plan. Then you can give feedback on what it thinks and have it come up with a new plan if you don't like it. Every bit of context and constraints you give it helps. Having a design doc + a little description of your design/code "philosophy" helps. This is easy to do in cursor with rules, I'm guessing other tools have a similar feature. Also, if there's a somewhat similar feature implemented already or if you have a particular style, tell it to reference example files/code snippets.