> But to get the most out of AI you should really be prompting as if you were writing a formal letter to the British throne explaining the background of your request. Basic English writing skills, and the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, have become essential skills for engineering (and something many developers simply lack).

That's probably why spec driven development has taken off.

The developers who can't write prompts now get AI to help with their English, and with clarifying their thoughts, so that other AI can help write their code.

You are correct. You absolutely must fill the token space with unanbiguous requirements, or Claude will just get "creative". You don't want the AI to do creative things in the same way you don't want an intern to do the same.

That said, I have found that I can get a lot of economy from speaking in terms of jargon, computer science formalisms, well-documented patterns, and providing code snippets to guide the LLM. It's trained on all of that, and it greatly streamlines code generation and refactoring.

Amusingly, all of this turns the task of coding into (mostly) writing a robust requirements doc. And really, don't we all deserve one of those?

> the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, have become essential skills for engineering

<Insert astronauts meme “Always has been”>

  The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.

And

  Some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.