A good prompt tells your AI assistant what to look at, what to change, and when to stop and check with you. Clear prompts keep your feasibility numbers accurate and stop your assistant from changing geometries you meant to keep.
Name what to change. Say which geometries, usages, or layers you mean, like "the three buildings with the Residential usage." Select geometries in Giraffe first and say "the selected geometries" to point at them.
Ask your assistant to read before it writes. Start with "Show me what you plan to change before you change it." Your assistant lists the changes, and you approve them.
Work in small steps. Ask for one change at a time and check it on the map before you ask for the next. A small change is easier to spot and undo, and each Giraffe step has a 30-second limit.
Give the numbers. Include your targets and controls, like a 24 m height limit, a 3:1 FAR, or 120 units. Your assistant uses your numbers instead of guessing.
Open the apps your assistant needs. Your assistant only uses an app's tools while that app is open in a panel with its MCP connection on. Open it in its own panel, then say which app to use, like "Use the stormwater app to screen the selected parcel."
Point to your other sources. Name the file, spreadsheet, or connector that holds the data, like "Use the rents in Feasibility.xlsx."
Keep requests to your project. Your assistant can only change the project it's working in. Make changes to other projects, shared layers, or workspace settings yourself in Giraffe.
Here's a prompt that follows these tips:
Read the planning controls in Site 14 controls.pdf. Check every building in this project against the height limit and FAR. List any that go over and show me the change you'd make to fix each one. Don't change anything until I approve.
If a request stops partway through, check your project before you ask your assistant to try again. It can't always tell whether the change was saved.
When your assistant or the MCP app shows a message you don't recognise, fix Giraffe MCP connection problems and errors.