Comment by kace91
21 hours ago
I currently work for a finance-related scaleup. So backend systems, with significant challenges related to domain complexity and scalability, but nothing super low level either.
It does take a bit to understand how to prompt in a way that the results are useful, can you share what you tried so far?
I have tried on a lot of different projects.
I have a codebase in Zig and it doesn't understand Zig at all.
I have another which is embedded C using zephyr RTOS. It doesn't understand zephyr at all and even if it could, it can't read the documentation for the different sensors nor can it plug in cables.
I have a tui project in rust using ratatui. The core of the project is dealing with binary files and the time it takes to explain to it how specific bits of data are organised in the file and then check it got everything perfectly correct (it never has) is more than the time to just write the code. I expect I could have more success on the actual TUI side of things but haven't tried too much since I am trying to learn rust with this project.
I just started an android app with flutter/dart. I get the feeling it will work well for this but I am yet to verify since I need to learn enough flutter to be able to judge it
My dayjob is a big C++ codebase making a GUI app with Qt. The core of it is all dealing with USB devices and Bluetooth protocols which it doesn't understand at all. We also have lots of very complicated C++ data structures, I had hoped that the AI would be able to at least explain them to me but it just makes stuff up everytime. This also means that getting it to edit any part of the codebase touching this sort if thing doesn't work. It just rips up any thread safety or allocates memory incorrectly etc. It also doesn't understand the compiler errors at all, I had a circular dependency and tried to get it to solve it but I had to give so many clues I basically told it what the problem was.
I really expected it to work very well for the Qt interface since building UI is what everyone seems to be doing with it. But the amount of hand holding it requires is insane. Each prompt feels like a monkey's paw. In every experiment I've done it would have been faster to just write it myself. I need to try getting it to write an entirely new pice of UI from scratch since I've only been editing existing UI so far.
Some of this is clearly a skill issue since I do feel myself getting better at prompting it and getting better results. However, I really do get the feeling that it either doesn't work or doesn't work as well on my code bases as other ones.
> I have a codebase in Zig and it doesn't understand Zig at all.
> I have another which is embedded C using zephyr RTOS. It doesn't understand zephyr at all and even if it could, it can't read the documentation for the different sensors nor can it plug in cables.
If you use Cursor, you can let it index the documentation for whatever language or framework you want [0], and it works exceptionally well. Don't rely solely on the LLM's training data, allow it to use external resources. I've done that and it solves many of the issues you're talking about.
[0] https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs
The Cursor docs indexing works very well and it’s probably the biggest thing missing from Windsurf. The other key is to stop the response when you see something going wrong and go back to your first message to add more context, like adding docs or links to library source files (a url to Github just fine) or attaching more files with types and annotations. Restarting your request with more context works better than asking it to fix things because the wrong code will pollute the probability space of future responses.