alt Hacker NewsI've spent quite a bit of time with Codex recently and come to the conclusion that you can't simply say "Let's add custom video controls around ReactPlayer." You need to follow up with a set of strict requirements to set expectations, guard rails, and what the final product should do (and not do). Even then it may have a few issues, but continuing to prompt with clearly stated problems that don't meet the requirements (or you forgot to include) usually clears it up.
Code that would have taken me a week to write is done in about 10 minutes. It's likely on average better than what I could personally write as a novice-mid level programmer.
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By the time I have figured out all those quirks and guardrails I could have done it myself in 45min tops.
It sounds like it takes you at least 10 minutes to just write the prompt with all the details you mentioned. Especially if you need to continue and prompt again (and again?).
>You need to follow up with a set of strict requirements to set expectations, guard rails, and what the final product should do (and not do).
that usually very hard to do part, and is was possible to spent few days on something like that in real word before LLMs. But with LLMs is worse because is not enough to have those requirements, some of those won't work for random reasons and is no any 'rules' that can grantee results. It always like 'try that' and 'probably this will work'.
Just recently I was struggled with same prompt produced different result between API calls before I realized that just usage of few more '\"' and few spaces in prompt leaded model to completely different route of logic which produced opposite answers.