[simonw]

The biggest lie in all of LLMs is that they’ll work out of the box and you don’t need to take time to learn them.

I find Copilot autocomplete invaluable as a productivity boost, but that’s because I’ve now spent over two years learning how to best use it!

“And it's much more difficult for me to explain the solution in English than in code--I basically already have the code in my head, now I'm going through a translation step to turn it into English.”

If that’s the case, don’t prompt them in English. Prompt them in code (or pseudo-code) and get them to turn that into code that’s more likely to be finished and working.

I do that all the time: many of my LLM prompts are the signature of a function or a half-written piece of code where I add “finish this” at the end.

Here’s an example, where I had started manually writing a bunch of code and suddenly realized that it was probably enough context for the LLM to finish the job… which it did: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Apr/8/files-to-prompt/#buildi...

[koliber]

You bring up a good point! These tools are useless if you can't prompt them effectively.

I am decent at explaining what I want in English. I have coded and managed developers for long enough to include tips on how I want something implemented. So far, I am nothing short of amazed. The tools are nowhere near perfect, but they do provide a non-trivial boost in my productivity. I feel like I did when I first used an IDE.