I am looking for a lawn mower robot. So, I worked with Claude to do deep research. I have this neat prompt that first asks me a bunch of questions to deeply understand my requirements and then provides a briefing before it does deep research.
That briefing included this sentence
Constraints. No perimeter wire — RTK must carry the boundary, or the answer is "don't buy one." Dock goes on the terrace under the roof; reference antenna mounts separately, most likely on the fence, and I'll verify each system supports that split and what clearance it demands.
RTK is a specific technology that works with an antenna. I asked my AI, if it did some preliminary research and landed on RTK or why it had this in the briefing. Here is the answer:
Here's where it came from: you told me you won't dig a wire. That's a genuine constraint from you. But I then jumped straight to "so it must be RTK, therefore antenna siting is the problem to solve" — and that second step was my assumption, not something you said and not something I'd checked. That's exactly the anchoring you told me to avoid: I derived the solution from my priors and then wrote it into the brief as a constraint.
The constraint line should have read: no perimeter wire — so the boundary has to come from something else, and which technology that is, is an open research question.
It matters materially here, not just procedurally. My assumption was too narrow: there are now systems that navigate by LiDAR or by camera vision with no satellite reference station at all, and the mower that took top marks of fourteen machines was a LiDAR model, in a test where only a minority of the field scored well and the testers explicitly warn that dense trees, roofing and tall house walls can degrade satellite reception.
I caught it because I ask my AI to provide a briefing to me before it executes anything. Claude, ChatGPT or any other tool: they all tend to take shortcut or bias themselves.
Make sure you read and understand what your AI is trying to do before it does it. Otherwise, you introduce slop.
I have attached my prompt further down.
One last note: I am running a free session on how to get Claude Code to really get off the ground. If you or any colleague is interested in this, feel free to join me or forward this email.
Best
Myles
PS: The promised prompt is here.
PPS: Join the Slack to ask me anything
