alt Hacker NewsI've been asking for little tutorials or implementation plans for things, and demanding that the model not write any code itself. Following the advice of Geoffrey Litt.[1] I find reviewing code written by my coworkers to be difficult when i'm being paid for it, surely i'm not gonna review thousands of lines of auto-generated code and the comprehensive tests required to trust them in my free time...!
So I've been learning kotlin & android development in the evenings and i find this style of thing to be so much more effective as a dev practice than claude code and a better learning practice than following dev.to tutorials. I've been coding for almost 20 years and find most tutorial or documentation stuff either targeted to someone who has hardly programmed at all, or just plain old API docs.
Asking the langlemangler to generate a dev plan, focusing on idiomatic implementation details and design questions rather than lines of code, and to let me fill in the algorithm implementations, it's been nice. I'll use the jetbrains AI autocomplete stuff for little things or ask it to refactor a stinky function but mostly I just follow the implementation plan so that the shape of the whole system is in my head.
Here's an example:
> i have scaffolded out a new project, an implementation of a library i've written multiple times in the last decade in multiple languages, but with a language i haven't written and with new design requirements specified in the documentation. i want you to write up an implementation plan, an in-depth tutorial for implementing the requirements in a Kotlin Multi Platform library. > i am still learning kotlin but have been programming for 20 years. you don't need to baby me, but don't assume i know best practices and proper idioms for kotlin. make sure to include background context, best practices, idioms, and rationale for the design choices and separation of concerns.
This produced a 3kb markdown file that i've been following while I develop this project.