The Wizard
When all you have is a prompt, everything looks like a spell.
The Wizard treats the LLM as an oracle. They ask big, open-ended questions and trust the output because it sounds authoritative. The model's fluency becomes a substitute for understanding, and the team slowly loses the ability to explain its own architecture.
Symptom
Architectural decisions justified with 'the model said,' design docs that read like prompt outputs, and a creeping inability to explain why the system is shaped the way it is.
Why It Matters
When fluency replaces understanding, debugging becomes guesswork and onboarding becomes impossible. The team owns code it can no longer reason about.
What the Chapter Gives You
The questions that puncture false fluency, how to keep the model in an advisory role, and the review prompts that force real reasoning back into the design.
Anti-Patterns
Artifacts
Want the full chapter? Grab the free cheat sheet, read an excerpt, or get the book.
Recognize this one in your codebase?
Free cheat sheet, excerpts, and interactive diagnostics.