Comment by runjake
6 days ago
You’re not providing a key piece of information to provide you with an answer: what were the prompts you used? You can share your sessions via URL.
A prompt like “Write a $x program that does $y” is generally going to produce some pretty poor code. You generally want to include a lot of details and desires in your prompt. And include something like “Ask clarifying questions until you can provide a good solution”.
A lot of the people who complain about poor code generation use poor prompting.
It'd be nice if the AI advocates shared prompts, or even recorded entire sessions. Then we could all see how great it really is.
They do. All over the place.
Simon Willison has some great examples in his blog and on his GitHub. Check out Karpathy’s YouTube videos as well.
https://simonwillison.net/
This one's been on the HN front page all day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
Many do. In their GitHub repos right next to the code.
"Infrastructure as Prompts" (IaP)
Prompt engineering isn't really that important anymore imo. If you're using a reasoning model, you can see if it understood your request by reading the reasoning trace.
Disagree, effective prompting remains a crucial skill that's difficult to acquire.
I've been developing my prompting skills for nearly three years now and I still constantly find new and better ways to prompt.
I also consider knowing what "use a reasoning model" means to be part of that skill!
That's a very dangerous thought. Prompt engineering evolved is just clear and direct communication. That's a hard thing to get right when talking to people. Heck, personally I can have a hard time with clear and coherent internal dialog. When I am working with models and encounter unexpected results, it often boils down to the model giving me what I asked for instead of what I want. I've never met anyone who always knows exactly what they want and is able to articulate it with perfect clarity. Some of the models are surprisingly good at figuring out intent, but complexity inevitably requires additional context. Whether you are working with a model or a person, or even your future self, you must spend time developing and articulating clear specifications, that is prompt engineering. Furthermore, models don't "think" like people--there's technique in how you struture specifications for optimal results.
Fair enough. I guess I was mainly thinking of how rarely I need to utilise the old prompt engineering techniques. Stuff like: "You are an expert software developer...", "you must do this or people will die." etc
I just tell the AI what I want, with sufficient context. Then, I check the reasoning trace to check it understood what I wanted. You need to be clear in your prompts, sure, but I don't really see it as "prompt engineering" any more.
Yeah I strongly disagree with that. I think prompts are very critical.
As with any other project, it’s best to specify your wants and needs than to let someone or an LLM to guess.
There a many ways to do something wrong and few ways to do them right. It's on the AI advocates to show us session logs so we can all see how it's done right.