alt Hacker News> I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle.
Because for all our posturing about being skeptical and data driven we all believe in magic.
Those "counterintuitive non-trivial workflows"? They work about as well as just prompting "implement X" with no rules, agents.md, careful lists etc.
Because 1) literally no one actually measures whether magical incarnations work and 2) it's impossible to make such measurements due to non-determinism
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On top of this a lot of the “learning to work with LLMs” is breaking down tasks into small pieces with clear instructions and acceptance criteria. That’s just part of working efficiently but maybe don’t want to be bothered to do it.
The problem with your argument here is that you're effectively saying that developers (like myself) who put effort into figuring out good workflows for coding with LLMs are deceiving themselves, and are effectively wasting their time.
Either I've wasted significant chunks of the past ~3 years of my life or you're missing something here. Up to you to decide which you believe.
I agree that it's hard to take solid measurements due to non-determinism. The same goes for managing people, and yet somehow many good engineering managers can judge if their team is performing well and figure out what levers they can pull to help them perform better.