[jumploops]

Yeah the old adage "what you put in is what you get out" is highly relevant here.

Admittedly I'm knowledgable in most of the domains I use LLMs for, but even so, my prompts are much longer now than they used to be.

LLMs are token happy, especially Claude, so if you give it a short 1-2 sentence prompt, your results will be wildly variable.

I now spend a lot of mental energy on my prompting, and resist the urge to use less-than-professional language.

Instead of "build me an app to track fitness" it's more like:

> "We're building a companion app for novice barbell users, roughly inspired by the book 'Starting Strength.' The app should be entirely local, with no back-end. We're focusing on iOS, and want to use SwiftUI. Users should [..] Given this high-level description, let's draft a high-level design doc, including implementation decisions, open questions, etc. Before writing any code, we'll review and iterate on this spec."

I've found success in this method for building apps/tools in languages I'm not proficient in (Rust, Swift, etc.).

[hackit2]

Yup, it makes me think that the whole bubble/marketing about how AI is going to revolutionize business and managers can just fire or make redundant 80% of their developers because they can replace them with a single Claude subscription to be hyperbolic, and very short sighted. Even from a Business standpoint - most of the cost that is associated with running a business isn't in the people but in the marketing and material cost - developers are probably the least costly part of a business. This is just due to the fact that developer have such a high ROI that it is silly to make the case that your developers are such a significant cost factor for running your business.

That being said, I may get to that stage. How-ever there is still a lot more growing pains to be had with LLM/AI before it reaches that point - if it ever does.