The CRISP pattern is a five-part structure for writing a request to a coding agent, presented in Del Vibe Coding al Spec Driven Development: cómo dirigir agentes de IA sin perder el control as the alternative to a vague intent such as “the login doesn’t work, fix it”. Its letters stand for Context (the exact environment the code runs in), Role (the identity the agent should assume), Instructions (exactly what it should do), Specifications (protocols, APIs, types and constraints) and Polish/Criteria (the definition of done and the acceptance criteria).
Usage
That post’s worked contrast sets a one-line lazy prompt beside a CRISP one that names the file, the method, the line where the error is raised and the condition that triggers it, says which existing error handler to use, and forbids creating new files. It uses the pattern within an account of Spec-driven development, where the precision of what is handed to the agent is treated as engineering work in its own right, and sums the point up as writing the prompt well being “ingeniería de costes” — cost engineering.
When It Applies
The pattern is aimed at the case the post describes as expensive: an imprecise request that forces the model to explore files blindly and reformulate hypotheses until it lands on something useful. The post’s claim is that the difference is economic as well as a matter of code quality — that a vague prompt can consume orders of magnitude more reasoning tokens than a precise one to reach the same result, with more errors.
How established it is: the only account held here is that one post, which presents the pattern without attributing it to a named originator and offers its cost claim as a general statement rather than a measurement.