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by vlunkr 38 days ago
It’s simple but contains all the necessary info. You can say “build an endpoint to get user data” and it will absolutely do something, but it might be stupid, and when you compound 1000 stupid prompts like that you get spaghetti.
2 comments
eloisius 38 days ago
It doesn’t contain any information at all about the structure of the JSON output. Is this a greenfield endpoint and anything will work is does it need to conform to an existing API? What about response codes for different failure modes? What about logging?

Your comment exemplifies what a lot of people complain about vibe coding: it works great for greenfielding CRUD apps, but it’s a bitch to use in a real code base.

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theshrike79 38 days ago
If it's not a greenfield project, the Agent will go and look at the other endpoints and mimic the style as much as possible. Just like a human would.

"But we have documentati..." then give the Agent access to the same docs as humans and it'll use them.

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sarchertech 37 days ago
On a real codebase there’s going to be v5 that is the newest version, v4 that we planned to migrate off of but we had to keep around for iOS clients, and v3 that no one except for a dozen huge enterprise customers use. But we need to support all 3 styles. This stuff is sort of documented, but not completely, and there’s a push by some people in the org to use v5 style for every new feature, but there’s one director pushing back on that. So you need to go talk to a few people and get enough condensed to CYA before deciding what to do.

Some version of that happens in every big company or every long running app. Claude isn’t AGI and that prompt isn’t nearly specific enough for anything outside of greenfield.

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theshrike79 37 days ago
AI can't fix shit processes =)

I actually believe it just surfaces them, humans will tolerate ambiguity like that and deal with it. AI Agents either won't work properly or will just fail to do anything useful.

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sarchertech 37 days ago
Every group of humans has shit processes. So if you’re trying to use AI in an actual company, today, that prompt won’t work properly or will just fail to do anything useful.
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sarchertech 38 days ago
A programmer wouldn’t write a prompt like that. Notice the questions the OP talked about out answering first.
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