Number the paws

Julia’s plan for the landing page’s hero: the little capybara walks back and forth across the screen, and when the visitor’s mouse approaches the button, it stops and a question mark pops up over its head ▸ 11:03. To build the walk cycle she’s drawing the leg positions as separate sprite frames.

Juan offers exactly one piece of advice, and it’s not about animation: number them. Patita uno, patita dos, patita tres ▸ 12:43. The reason he gives is the teaching: number them in order “para poderle explicar al programa más fácil cómo es, porque si no te va a hacer un montón de patas” ▸ 12:57. The “programa” here is the AI that will wire the animation together. If the frames arrive as an unnamed pile, the prompt has to describe each one (“the paw that’s slightly forward, no, the other one”), and ambiguity in the assets becomes ambiguity in the instruction becomes a mess in the output.

nombrar los archivos ES escribir el prompt →

This is entry 55-1’s discipline applied one level lower. That entry was about structuring the conversation before letting the AI touch code; this one is about structuring the inputs before the conversation even starts. Both come from the same realization: working with an AI shifts your effort from doing the thing to making the thing describable. A sprite sheet named patita-1 through patita-5 carries its own ordering, its own count, and its own meaning; the prompt collapses to “cycle these in order.”

It’s a thirty-second habit that costs nothing when you don’t need it and saves a whole debugging session when you do. Name your assets for the conversation you’re going to have about them…