I used to end my day with todos like “fix auth” and “clean up API” and then wake up the next morning having no idea what I actually meant.
Fix auth how? Which auth? The login flow? The token refresh? The middleware? I’d spend the first 20 minutes of my next session just rebuilding the context I had the night before.
This is 10x worse with Claude Code. A vague todo sends an AI coding agent searching for context. That search costs tokens and time, and it often sends the session in the wrong direction entirely.
So I started writing specific todos: “the /api/auth/refresh endpoint returns 401 when the token has more than 2 hours left. Check the expiry comparison in middleware/auth.ts line 47. The gte should probably be lte.”
The difference is night and day. A vague prompt means Claude Code will: read your entire auth directory, grep for related tests, maybe check your git log, read 4-5 files trying to understand the system, then ask you a clarifying question anyway. That’s 30+ tool calls before any actual work happens.
A specific prompt means it opens the one file, goes to the line, sees the issue, fixes it, runs the test. Done in under 10 tool calls.
I started doing this for everything. “Add dark mode” becomes “add a dark mode toggle to the settings page. Use the existing ThemeContext in src/contexts/theme.tsx. The toggle should go in the appearance section of SettingsPanel.tsx after the font size selector. Store preference in localStorage key ‘theme-preference’.”
It takes me maybe 2 extra minutes to write a specific todo at the end of a session. But it saves 10+ minutes of wasted context-building at the start of the next one. And with Claude Code, those saved minutes are also saved dollars because every file read and grep is a tool call that costs tokens.
The real unlock: I started writing these specific todos AS the last message in my Claude Code session before I close it. When I resume the next day, Claude already has the specific context loaded and starts working immediately.
Your end-of-day todo is a prompt for tomorrow’s AI agent. Write it like one.