You are a knowledge worker who decomposed a “draft a board memo” request into fifteen...

Task decomposition is valuable only when the resulting stages represent meaningful, logically connected units of work. Here, dividing a board memo into fifteen extremely small steps has fragmented related ideas and weakened the document’s narrative coherence. Option B corrects over-decomposition by combining naturally connected activities into broader sections, such as framing the decision, analyzing evidence, presenting risks, and stating the recommendation.

Option A removes dependency order entirely, which would make the workflow less reliable. Option C intensifies the existing problem by creating even smaller fragments. Option D goes too far in the opposite direction by discarding all useful structure. The appropriate solution is neither maximal decomposition nor a single unstructured instruction; it is a limited number of cohesive stages with clear dependencies.

Anthropic explains that explicit prompt chaining is useful when intermediate outputs must be inspected or when a specific pipeline structure is required. However, its guidance also warns against unnecessary delegation and overengineering when simpler direct work preserves context more effectively. The correct granularity should therefore improve control and reviewability without separating ideas that must be developed together. Anthropic’s prompting best practices

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