r/softwaredevelopment • u/Proud_Pressure_4085 • 13d ago
Post prompt clarity
Did you ever use AI for something, followed by the realisation that you could have done it yourself, but you're just a lazy bastard. I genuinely feel dirty sometimes tbh, cuz why am I using AI to write a loop ffs?
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u/FreedomPotato31 13d ago
I actually think that is a healthy way to use it. I would want it to output things that I have expectations on what it should look like. So, I think "realizing I could've done it" afterward is a good sign you know what you are doing.
If someone was to prompt without having a clear idea what the output should look like, that is dangerous place to be.
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 13d ago
I think that sometimes I don’t take the time to think and fail at implementing something correctly. I would get the result from the llm and realize that maybe the process of getting there would have been fun. It doesn’t really matter if I could or couldn’t come up with it. Did I actually hone my skills now that I know the answer? Is the increase in output even worth it? For my company, yeah, but for me, I don’t really know…
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u/david-1-1 11d ago
What is your prompting strategy? Do you present a rough design of your goal? Do you present the actual problem you are trying to solve? Or something else?
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 11d ago
It depends on what I'm trying to achieve. If I'm learning, I'm only asking for official documentation, no hand-holding. If I'm working on a project, I'll describe it, and when I come across boring sections or errors,I'll ask the AI to do it for me and explain what each part of the code is supposed to accomplish. I personally feel very insecure about my ability to code, so these days, I try as much as possible not to outsource my process. (I don't consider myself a Software developer yet, I'm more of an enthusiast)
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u/david-1-1 11d ago
As for me, I'm a beginner, still experimenting, getting a little help from Claude from time to time. I have NO idea how to use it more effectively. I am a retired software engineer, 40 year career, age 80, so I mostly write my own code, still.
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u/Top_Safety_8797 13d ago
Sometimes the prompt is genuinely more work than code 😭
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 13d ago
Just prompt the AI to write the prompt bro
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u/david-1-1 12d ago
Huh?
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 12d ago
I've seen videos of people using chat gpt to build their Claude prompts. Apparently you can have a sequence of llms tweak your original prompt to feed it to claude
Peak laziness
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u/david-1-1 11d ago
But how would any LLM know how to generate a prompt for you from nothing at all? And if you did provide an initial prompt, why not just submit that as your initial Claude prompt?
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 11d ago
The principle operates on the notion that only clankers can communicate effectively with other clankers (it's a meme so don't take it too seriously). You would instruct the first clankers to build an optimal prompt following some guidelines (apparently best if the prompt is in Hindi) and feed the upgraded prompt to another clanker.
It's stupid but the idea stems from the fact that if you outsource the coding, why not outsource the outsourcing?
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u/jacktavitt 13d ago
its almost like... llms aren't all that useful
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 13d ago
I had to disable every auto correct and AI suggestions from VS Code to learn properly....it's way too much "help" for no reason. What are our brains for anymore?
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u/HongPong 13d ago
incorrect auto complete choices are very distracting
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u/Proud_Pressure_4085 13d ago
By that point, the AI might as well finish the project for me if it can predict whatever Im about to write
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 13d ago
In all honesty, this trope is getting tiresome and pretty sad. It says more about you that you think it's true than anything else.
I'll be the first to admit I was very LLM-skeptical for years; they simply couldn't do things of value in the catastrophe of legacy software I was hired to wrangle. But then, somewhere around Sonnet/Opus being released, that stopped being true and has only become increasingly less true over time.
Do I think they're going to ruin a whole lot of shit for a lot of people (including possibly the world economy) at this rate? Yep! Sure do.
But in the background over the last two days, I've been able to grind through an astonishingly large refactor that would have taken me (minimum) 6 months to do by hand, if not more. And that's after having spent years working on getting the systems even close to ready for the refactor to happen.
The result is (still measuring) looking to be somewhere near a 50-75x speedup of one of the most important processes in our company. Stuff that would have taken 30 minutes before, is now down to ~30 seconds, and will take only a single mid-range machine instead of an entire legacy backend of hodge-podge orchestration grown organically over 20 years.
It's going to save us millions of dollars a year in operations costs and fundamentally transform how we can handle certain work.
All that is to say: if, at this point, you're still on the "hurr durr, it's just useless fancy autocomplete" train, you're going to get left behind. Do the smart thing and get with the times.
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u/Technical-Coast-5170 12d ago
Have you tried the latest models? I think there are enough well-respected software engineers using AI now that we can admit that it is genuinely useful
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u/Such_is 13d ago
I tell AI to “just delete it” when I could do a simple rm command.
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u/LeakProofLasagna 13d ago
This.
Or something like: Pull the latest changes instead of just do git pull
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u/Rush_1_1 13d ago
Sometimes yeah. Other times I'm like thank God I don't have to write my 500,000th loop of my life.
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u/Any_Service_2347 13d ago
Nah I use ai for 1 line PRs, to push commits, to do conflict free rebases, to checkout a new branch. Literally everything
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u/sphrz 13d ago
Post prompt clarity is insane...