A little bit more time and people might finally understand why we have formal deterministic languages, and we'll be back full circle to proper programming.
What jumps out at me is a lot of this is still very task oriented. And each to their own, but anecdotally, I haven't seen great results from task oriented behavior.
I don't mean that it does not produce what was asked for. I'm saying that tasks even when created by engineering and product teams are often wrong.
I lean very heavily towards outcome based prompting. Say exactly what do you want achieved and then maybe give some constraints, ie. what definitely not to do.
In my experiments, this has always produced much, much better results.
Interestingly, it's less engineering and more customer focus.
Say what you want, followed by how you want it done, which includes unit testing, research (Claude can do research for you) on best practices, etc. I usually also follow up with "Why would I NOT want to do this this way, be critical of this." Usually outlines sensible issues, you give guidance, then the plan is ready to go. Then you test, test, and when you're done testing, you test some more, and review all code. I find that despite how busy that all sounds, I save myself weeks of effort.
> I lean very heavily towards outcome based prompting. Say exactly what do you want achieved and then maybe give some constraints, ie. what definitely not to do.
I do this when writing stories/projects/issues/epics for humans. Works great.
If you read any management book published in the last ~70 or so years, you’ll find that “Make sure people understand the goal” is the ultimate hack. They even use this in militaries!
“go take that hill” works a lot better than “walk 50ft to the right and shoot at those bushes”. You always get what you ask for :)
It still makes me laugh when i see "prompt engineering". I open articles posted on here that contain many diagrams and novel jargon, all for it to amount to using a fucking markdown file with some text in it.
What jumps out at me is a lot of this is still very task oriented. And each to their own, but anecdotally, I haven't seen great results from task oriented behavior.
I don't mean that it does not produce what was asked for. I'm saying that tasks even when created by engineering and product teams are often wrong.
I lean very heavily towards outcome based prompting. Say exactly what do you want achieved and then maybe give some constraints, ie. what definitely not to do.
In my experiments, this has always produced much, much better results.
Interestingly, it's less engineering and more customer focus.
I do this when writing stories/projects/issues/epics for humans. Works great.
If you read any management book published in the last ~70 or so years, you’ll find that “Make sure people understand the goal” is the ultimate hack. They even use this in militaries!
“go take that hill” works a lot better than “walk 50ft to the right and shoot at those bushes”. You always get what you ask for :)
TFA was written by an AI without even search access, or it would know that all those are OLD deprecated models. AI Slop.
If the author doesn't even bother checking what his AI spit out, why would I read it? Useless article. I'm baffled that this reached the front page.