alt Hacker NewsThis definitely is the case. I was talking to someone complaining about how llms don't work good.
They said it couldn't fix an issue it made.
I asked if they gave it any way to validate what it did.
They did not, some people really are saying "fix this" instead of saying "x fn is doing y when someone makes a request to it. Please attempt to fix x and validate it by accessing the endpoint after and writing tests"
Its shocking some people don't give it any real instruction or way to check itself.
In addition I get great results doing voice to text with very specific workflows. Asking it to add a new feature where I describe what functions I want changed then review as I go vs wait for the end.
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There are subtler versions of this too. I've been working on a TUI app for a couple of weeks, and having great success getting it to interactively test by sending tmux commands, but every once in a while it would just deliver code that didn't work. I finally realized it was because the capture tools I gave it didn't capture the cursor location, so it would, understandably, get confused about where it was and what was selected.
I promptly went and fixed this before doing any more work, because I know if I was put in that situation I would refuse to do any more work until I could actually use the app properly. In general, if you wouldn't be able to solve a problem with the tools you give an LLM, it will probably do a bad job too.
If you tell a human junior developer just "fix this" then they will spend a week on a wild-goose chase with nothing to show for it.
At least the LLM will only take 5 minutes to tell you they don't know what to do.
Yeah, the more time I spend in planning and working through design/api documentation for how I want something to work, the better it does... Similar for testing against your specifications, not the code... once you have a defined API surface and functional/unit tests for what you're trying to do, it's all the harder for AI to actually mess things up. Even more interesting is IMO how well the agents work with Rust vs other languages the more well defined your specifications are.
> some people really are saying "fix this" instead of saying "x fn is doing y when someone makes a request to it. Please attempt to fix x and validate it by accessing the endpoint after and writing tests"
This works about 85% of the time IME, in Claude Code. My normal workflow on most bugs is to just say “fix this” and paste the logs. The key is that I do it in plan mode, then thoroughly inspect and refine the plan before allowing it to proceed.
Untested Hypothesis: LLM instruction is usually an intelligence+communication-based skill. I find in my non-authoritative experience that users who give short form instructions are generally ill prepared for technical motivation (whether they're motivating LLMs or humans).
lol that is still “how you’re talking to them that affects the results” just more specific
Feeding the LLM a "copy as cURL" for its feedback loop instead of letting it manage the dev server was an unlock for me.
> Its shocking some people don't give it any real instruction or way to check itself.
It's not shocking. The tech world is telling them that "Claude will write all of their app easily" with zero instructions/guidelines so of course they're going to send prompts like that.