alt Hacker NewsI spent more time correcting LLMs or agentics systems than just learning the domain and doing the coding myself. I mainly leave LLM to the boring work of doing tedious repetitive code.
If I give it anything resembling anything that I'm not an expert on, it will make a mess of things.
Yeah the old adage "what you put in is what you get out" is highly relevant here.
Admittedly I'm knowledgable in most of the domains I use LLMs for, but even so, my prompts are much longer now than they used to be.
LLMs are token happy, especially Claude, so if you give it a short 1-2 sentence prompt, your results will be wildly variable.
I now spend a lot of mental energy on my prompting, and resist the urge to use less-than-professional language.
Instead of "build me an app to track fitness" it's more like:
> "We're building a companion app for novice barbell users, roughly inspired by the book 'Starting Strength.' The app should be entirely local, with no back-end. We're focusing on iOS, and want to use SwiftUI. Users should [..] Given this high-level description, let's draft a high-level design doc, including implementation decisions, open questions, etc. Before writing any code, we'll review and iterate on this spec."
I've found success in this method for building apps/tools in languages I'm not proficient in (Rust, Swift, etc.).