Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM?

5 hours ago

I'm moving some terraform state after a refactor. A very tedious problem (as some of you may know). About 50 resources to be destroyed, and 50 to be created, it would take me at least 1-2 hours to manually move the state, more if I mess up somewhere along the way and have to redo it.

So, to dodge this, I created a detailed prompt asking claude sonnet 4 to do this for me. I gave it very clear instructions (~2 min writeup) + the plaintext terraform plan. It successfully generated all the terraform state mv commands I needed in about 1-2 minutes, which I could xargs and boom, done! High value LLM query! Low amount of input tokens (relatively speaking), low amount of output tokens, saving magnitudes of time (which, as we all know, is money).

Please share your high-value LLM queries!

3 comments

baalimago

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scarface_74  4 hours ago

Two words - “devils advocate”.

Any time that I’m trying to think through something or want an “opinion” about design choices or am I misting something, I type those two words in so it will be critical.

My next favorite prompt, “I’m having an issue with $X and having a hard time tracking it down. Help me work backwards. Don’t assume anything. Ask me clarifying questions as needed”. It’s great for rubber ducking.

For AWS troubleshooting, I ask if to give me AWS CLI commands to help it help me to debug and to always append “ | pbcopy” to it so I can just paste the output.