How to Write a PRD Your AI Coding Agent Won't Misread

AI coding agents don't fill gaps with judgment — they fill them with plausible guesses. A spec that omits the empty state will get an empty state, just not the one you wanted. For a vibe coder shipping an MVP with Claude Code, that's a bug you paid tokens to generate.

The fix isn't longer specs. It's technical PRDs that are explicit about the states humans usually leave implicit: loading, empty, error, partial, and over-limit. Each one deserves a defined behavior and, where it shows, exact copy. That's the difference between PRD slop and a spec an agent can build.

Acceptance criteria are the contract

Write acceptance criteria — INVEST-scored, one testable outcome per user story — that the agent can check itself against. 'Handles errors gracefully' is unimplementable. 'On a 500, show the retry banner with this exact message and a Retry button' is a contract.

If a developer — human or agent — has to guess, your spec hasn't finished its job.

The five states to never omit

• Loading: what's on screen while data is in flight.
• Empty: first-run, with the exact prompt to act.
• Error: the message, the recovery path, the retry.
• Partial: some data loaded, some failed.
• Over-limit: quota hit, with the upgrade path.

Specify these once, precisely, and the difference between what you imagined and what gets built collapses to nearly nothing. Prodstack's Requirements and Backlog stages write these technical PRDs and INVEST-scored stories for you, so your coding agent builds the right thing the first time. Start free for 7 days.