List your process steps out of order and let Claude sequence them

When you're asking an AI tool to turn a process into a flowchart, the instinct is to write the steps out in order first, then hand them over tidily. Don't. List them in whatever order they come to mind and ask the model to sequence them itself.

Here's why that's better, not just faster: getting the order right forces the model to reason about dependencies - what has to happen before what else can - and that's exactly the reasoning that surfaces a step you forgot to mention. It'll ask (or flag) things like "this needs an approval before it can move to the next stage - did you mean to include that?" or notice that your "send confirmation email" step has no obvious trigger before it in your list.

A tidy, pre-ordered list doesn't get this scrutiny. It reads as already correct, so the model just formats it - the exact failure mode you're trying to avoid, because a plausible-looking flowchart with a silently missing approval step is worse than an obviously incomplete one.

Next time you're building a process diagram, dump the steps in randomly and ask it to work out the sequence and flag anything that doesn't obviously fit. The gaps it finds are usually the same gaps a real audit of the process would find - for free, before you've built anything.