Comment by mergesort
2 months ago
I spend a lot of time teaching people AI by having them bring their own idea that we build it over a three-hour workshop. [1]
The workshop starts off with a very simple premise. I ask people to write their idea down in a Google Doc with all the details they need to hand it off to an AI, so the AI can build it autonomously.
What people discover is that communicating your idea is MUCH harder than they thought. They often write a few sentences or a paragraph, and I plainly ask them "if you gave this to a junior developer do you think they'd be able to build your idea?" They say of course not, and we try again.
We do a v2, a v3, a v4, and so on, while we talk through their ideas, develop new ideas ideas to improve their prompt, and I teach them about how AI can make this process easier. The workshop goes on and on and on like this, until we have a page or two of context. Finally we can hand the idea off to AI, and boom — a few minutes later they either have their idea or they have something we can quickly mold into their vision.
This part of the process is where I think most people struggle. People think they're good communicators, but they only realize how much work it is to communicate their ideas once they are faced with the prospect of clearly describing their problem and writing it down in front of another person.
I say this not to try to shill my workshops, but to say that the results are spectacular for a simple reason. Describing the problem well is 80% of the work, but once you do that and do it well — AI can take over and do a genuinely excellent job.
I often joke at the end of my workshops that I call these AI workshops, but it's effectively a three hour workshop on communication. Most software developers wouldn't pay much for a communication workshop even if it makes them more effective at using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or even vibe coding, so I wrap everything up in a neatly AI sandwich. :)
This is the key. Working with AI is exactly like project management.
You have a problem and you need to describe it in a way that Other People can solve it in a way that satisfies what you want and need.
"Build me a spaced repetition web app using FSRS" will give you _something_, the statistical average to be exact, but most likely it's not what you meant or wanted.
You need to make the implicit things in your head explicit and write them down. AND then you need to split that into manageable chunks of work that build on top of each other.
It's a skill.