alt Hacker NewsThis one shot thing I just don’t understand. The way I’m using it, it takes weeks of constant prompts because it never does exactly what I ask no matter how well I specify. I just don’t see how it’s possible to one shot anything unless you don’t have strong requirements on the output.
I had pretty good success with a language learning app. Initial prompt below, about an hour to get it working very close to how I imagined, then extended to Japanese, French, and audio generation.
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Hi! I'd like to create an app for interactively learning Chinese using AI. My current idea is:
- The AI generates a Chinese sentence at a specified vocabulary level (e.g. HSK2)
- The user translates the sentence into English, and the AI evaluates the response. If the answer is wrong or is partially correct but could be improved, the AI offers a hint. If correct, the AI confirms and explains any particularly important vocabulary or grammar points that the sentence demonstrates.
- The user should be able to click on an individual character once to see the pinyin, and again to see its definition and any helpful techniques to remember it (radicals, similarity to other characters, visual meaning)
- The app should also be able to go the other way, giving the user an English sentence and having them translate to Chinese.
App details:
- UI is a web app
- The AI should be pluggable. We'll start with a local Ollama install running gemma4, but it should be easily possible to add support for Claude/OpenAI/Gemini or other models (may need to provide an API key).
- Not actually sure if we need a backend. It might be useful to keep track of characters or concepts that the user has difficulty with, or to keep track of what sentences the AI has previously generated so it doesn't become repetitive.
- Build everything in a Docker container (or multiple if needed with docker compose)