Welcome to the most chaotic corner of AI use: getting it to write code. This is where "vibe coding" lives, where you describe a vibe and hope working software falls out. Sometimes it does. Often you get something that looks right, runs once, and explodes the moment a real user touches it.

Here is the mindset shift. The AI is not a mind reader, it is the world's fastest junior developer who never asks clarifying questions. It will confidently build exactly what you said, including the parts you did not mean. So the whole game of prompting for code is writing a spec: a short, clear statement of what you want, in what stack, with what rules.

Why "just the code"? Because by default the model writes a friendly essay around your snippet, restating the problem, explaining every line, and wishing you a nice day. That is output tokens you will scroll straight past. Tell it to skip the speech.