Comment by simonw
6 days ago
If you think in code, try prompting them in code.
I quite often prompt with code in a different language, or pseudo-code describing roughly what I am trying to achieve, or a Python function signature without the function body.
Or I will paste in a bunch of code I have already written with a comment somewhere that says "TODO: retrieve the information from the GitHub API" and have the model finish it for me.
> a Python function signature without the function body.
This, and for multiple functions that end up composing well together as per their signatures. Maybe there's one public function I want to document well, so I write the docstring myself, and it's the result for 3-4 other internal functions which I'd let the LLM implement.
The nice part is that even if the LLM fails, all that is not lost, as opposed to some weird spec I'd feed an LLM but that's too verbose for a human reader, or a series of prompts.