alt Hacker NewsI did ask the AI first, about some things that I already knew how to do.
It gave me horribly inefficient or long-winded ways of doing it. In the time it took for "prompt tuning" I could have just written the damn code myself. It decreased the confidence for anything else it suggested about things I didn't already know about.
Claude still sometimes insists that iOS 26 isn't out yet. sigh.. I suppose I just have to treat it as an occasional alternative to Google/StackOverflow/Reddit for now. No way would I trust it to write an entire class let alone an app and be able to sleep at night (not that I sleep at night, but that's besides the point)
I think I prefer Xcode's built-in local model approach better, where it just offers sane autocompletions based on your existing code. e.g. if you already wrote a Dog class it can make a Cat class and change `bark()` to `meow()`
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> Claude still sometimes insists that iOS 26 isn't out yet.
How would you imagine an AI system working that didn't make mistakes like that?
iOS 26 came out on September 15th.
LLMs aren't omniscient or constantly updated with new knowledge. Which means we have to figure out how to make use of them despite them not having up-to-the-second knowledge of the world.
You can write the "prompt tuning" down in AGENTS.md and then you only need to do it once. This is why you need to keep working with different ones to get the feeling what they're good at and how you can steer them closer to your style and preferences without having to reiterate from scratch every time.
I personally have a git submodule built specifically for shared instructions like that, it contains the assumptions and defaults for my specific style of project for 3 different programming languages. When I update it on one project, all my projects benefit.
This way I don't need to tell whatever LLM I'm working with to use modernc.org/sqlite for database connections, for example.