Comment by rtpg
6 hours ago
tbh I'm just confused at why people ask AI to design features. Do you not know how to design a feature? Do you not know what you want?
This stuff works so much better when you just tell it what to do
6 hours ago
tbh I'm just confused at why people ask AI to design features. Do you not know how to design a feature? Do you not know what you want?
This stuff works so much better when you just tell it what to do
Oh course it's not black and white, there are many shades of grey in how detailed the design of a feature can be. Often even if I know low level details, I'll only give the AI high level requirements because I want to see how it would do it. Often it comes up alternative/better ways of doing what I planned and I incorporate those ideas into the final design.
The designing is the hard part. Writing code from a comprehensive design spec is a small part of the task.
So, people do know how to design a feature, but they also know it takes a lot of time and effort. They want AI to do that work for them.
My sample size is pretty small but when I've witnessed people (both PMs and engineers) "design through AI" I have seen two flavors:
- aimless AI wandering, leading to pretty, frankly, useless design docs
- using AI to "expand" upon a bullet pointed/shorthanded design doc. To which I feel like saying "the bullet points are already a good design doc!"
I understand that teams sometimes have specific formats that they have to make deliverables for, but having a nice 5 point bulletpoint list turn into 5 paragraphs... all for me to turn the 5 paragraphs back into 5 bullet points in my notes is depressing.
I do think you can get a lot of value in the mechanics, I just have had so much success leaving the thinking to me and the rote stuff to the AI. I'm going to have to think about the design eventually anyways right?