SPDD: Structure first. Build deliberately. Verify the result.
By Mark Hoblit — draft for personal review
I call myself a Structured Prompt Driven Developer. I use structured prompts to turn an idea into a clear, testable plan, then guide the work through implementation and verification. My approach draws on Structured Prompt-Driven Development, or SPDD.
I do not think of AI as intelligence in the human sense. I see it as mathematical computation—and I love math. What interests me is how useful these systems become when I give them clear goals, relevant context, constraints and a way to check their work.
The most useful lesson is to make intent explicit. Before asking for code, I describe the problem, who it affects and what success should look like. I separate confirmed requirements from assumptions and unanswered questions. A confident answer is not evidence that something works.
I keep the purpose, design, code and checks connected. When the requirements change, I update the plan. When a check fails, I preserve the evidence and correct the cause. Passing a test, publishing a release and having a person confirm the result are different milestones.
Security and permissions belong in the plan from the beginning. Credentials stay out of prompts and public records. Access has a defined scope. An unavailable connection is a limitation to resolve, not permission to bypass the boundary.
For me, structured prompting is an engineering practice: make the request precise, keep decisions traceable, work in manageable steps and verify what actually happened. The human remains responsible for judgment and the result.
Method references
My personal explanation draws on existing Structured Prompt-Driven Development work.