alt Hacker NewsUsing voice transcription is nice for fully expressing what you want, so the model doesn't need to make guesses. I'm often voicing 500-word prompts. If you talk in a winding way that looks awkward when in text, that's fine. The model will almost certainly be able to tell what you mean. Using voice-to-text is my biggest suggestion for people who want to use AI for programming
(I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can go 70-90 WPM on a typing test. However, this speed drops quickly when I need to also think about what I'm saying. Typing that fast is also kinda tiring, whereas talking/thinking at 100-120 WPM feels comfortable. In general, I think just this lowered friction makes me much more willing to fully describe what I want)
You can also ask it, "do you have any questions?" I find that saying "if you have any questions, ask me, otherwise go ahead and build this" rarely produces questions for me. However, if I say "Make a plan and ask me any questions you may have" then it usually has a few questions
I've also found a lot of success when I tell Claude Code to emulate on some specific piece of code I've previously written, either within the same project or something I've pasted in
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100% this, I built laboratory.love almost entirely with my voice and (now-outdated) Claude models
My go-to prompt finisher, which I have mapped to a hotkey due to frequent use, is "Before writing any code, first analyze the problem and requirements and identify any ambiguities, contradictions, or issues. Ask me to clarify any questions you have, and then we'll proceed to writing the code"
voice transcription is silly when someone is listening you talking to something that isn't exactly human, imagine explaining you were talking to AI. When it's more than one sentence I use voice too.
That's a fun idea. How do you get the transcript into Claude Code (or whatever you use)? What transcription service do you use?
Thanks for the advice! Could you please share how did you enable voice transcription for your setup and what it actually is?
It's an AI. You might do better by phrasing it, 'Make a plan, and have questions'. There's nobody there, but if it's specifically directed to 'have questions' you might find they are good questions! Why are you asking, if you figure it'd be better to get questions? Just say to have questions, and it will.
It's like a reasoning model. Don't ask, prompt 'and here is where you come up with apropos questions' and you shall have them, possibly even in a useful way.
Speech also uses a different part of the brain, and maybe less finger coordination.
surprised ai companies are not making this workflow possible instead of leaving it upto users to figure out how to get voice text into prompt.
> I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can go 70-90 WPM on a typing test. However, this speed drops quickly when I need to also think about what I'm saying. Typing that fast is also kinda tiring, whereas talking/thinking at 100-120 WPM feels comfortable.
This doesn't feel relatable at all to me. If my writing speed is bottlenecked by thinking about what I'm writing, and my talking speed is significantly faster, that just means I've removed the bottleneck by not thinking about what I'm saying.