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notnullorvoidtoday at 5:04 PM2 repliesview on HN

Interesting, I've found AI to be further from the goal of converting my thoughts to code than writing code myself.

English is so ambiguous that by the time I provide sufficient context to the prompt it's taken more typing than writing the code would have been. That's not even accounting for the output often needing further prompting to manipulate into what was intended, especially if I try to be light on initial context.

I like it for quick proof of concept stuff though, the details don't matter so much then.


Replies

lukaslalinskytoday at 5:26 PM

I really approach is the same way as helping my coworkers to be productive. Most of the context is spent on the initial familiarizing with the code and I just double-check that it has the right understanding, there is minimal prompting on my side for this. The next step is to explain the problem I'm trying to solve and and for the simpler ones, it gets what needs to happen 8/10 times. I don't need to be detailed, because it already knows the context. For the complex problems, I split them into small tasks myself and only ask it to do the small steps, small enough to fit into the first category. I feel like the worst outcomes happen when you specify the problem first and let it do it's own research with that in "mind", then it just overthinks and comes up garbage.

peytontoday at 5:30 PM

Give it the problem first. Then have it generate the context. Make edits and iterate on the context. Then hit go. Finally, have it write down whatever it needs to for next time.