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by maaanu 868 days ago
Yes, I've observed the same phenomenon. The more detailed my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I start coding. That works very well, because gpt and I usually find somethings, that I missed at a first glance.

But coding with gpt or co-pilot is too disrupted for me.

1 comments

> The more detailed my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I start coding.

This is interesting; I do a third thing that's the exact opposite of both of you.

I generally know the architecture I want, so I just slowly spoon-feed it to GPT-4 and have it build each of the components with the right interfaces to fit together. Usually, building each component requires a few rounds of hand-holding it through various refactoring. Its first draft of code tends to be, for lack of a better description, totally lacking in any creativity or elegance --- generally bland, insipid, and mundane stuff.

But it'll gladly take refactoring directions to get it into shape, so it's still very quick to get a whole bunch of components written up. Then I just glue everything together on my own. And the whole experience is still way better than writing a bunch of boring boilerplate code by hand.