14 AI Prompts for Faster Development

Here are 14 prompts I use regularly for common development tasks. They're organized by use case and designed to work with Claude Code or similar AI assistants.

Discovery & Analysis (4 prompts)

• Project exploration & pattern finding - Quickly understand unfamiliar codebases
• Security scanning & vulnerability detection - Identify common security issues
• Performance bottleneck hunting - Find slow code paths and optimization opportunities
• Codebase understanding - Get oriented in new projects fast

Quick Wins & Cleanup (4 prompts)

• TODO tracking & technical debt audit - Find and organize TODOs across the codebase
• Dependency cleanup & version management - Identify outdated or unused dependencies
• Style refactoring & consistency - Apply consistent formatting and patterns
• Lint fixing - Batch fix linting issues across files

Building & Creating (4 prompts)

• Component cloning - Create new components following existing patterns
• Test generation - Generate tests with edge case coverage
• Error handling implementation - Add consistent error handling
• API documentation generation - Document endpoints and interfaces

Migration & Evolution (2 prompts)

• TypeScript migration - Add types with inference where possible
• Database schema changes - Migrations with safety checks

Example: Security Scanning Prompt

One of the most useful prompts scans for common security issues: authentication bypasses, SQL injection, XSS vulnerabilities, and insecure configurations. It searches the entire codebase and reports findings with file locations.

Example: TODO Audit Prompt

The TODO audit prompt finds all TODO, FIXME, and HACK comments, categorizes them by urgency and type, then generates a prioritized cleanup plan. Useful for technical debt planning.