alt Hacker News> What was your thought process using AI? > Share your prompts! Share your process! It helps me understand your rationale.
why? does it matter? do you ask the same questions for people that don't use AI? I don't like using AI for code because I don't like the code it generates and having to go over and over until I like it, but I don't care how people write code. I review the code that's on the PR and if there's I don't understand/agree, I comment on the PR
other than the 1600 lines PR that's hard to view, it feels that the author just want to be in the way and control everything other people are doing
Replies
Because when your code is handwritten, it's supposed to be a translation of you parsing business requirements to code.
Using AI adds a non-deterministic layer in between, and a lot of code now is there that you probably didn't need.
The prompt is helpful to figure out what is needed and what isn't.
> why? does it matter? do you ask the same questions for people that don't use AI?
…yes? If someone dumps a PR on me without any rationale I definitely want to understand their thought process about how they landed on this solution!
Yes of course you should ask the same thing of other non AI PRs. Figuring out the why and the thought process behind behavior is one of the most important parts of communication especially when you don’t know people as well
The prompt is the ground truth that reveals the assumptions and understandings of the person who generated the code.
It makes a lot more sense to review and workshop that into a better prompt than to refactor the derived code when there are foundational problems with the prompt.
Also, we do do this for human-generated code. It's just a far more tedious process of detective work since you often have to go the opposite direction and derive someone's understanding from the code. Especially for low effort PRs.
Ideally every PR would come with an intro that sells the PR and explains the high level approach. That way you can review the code with someone's objectives in mind, and you know when deviations from the objective are incidental bugs rather than misunderstandings.