So what you’re saying is you need to be very specific and detailed when writing your specifications for the LLM to spit out the code you want. Sounds like I can just skip the middle man and code it myself.
Not in 10 seconds
You probably didn’t write up a detailed prompt with perfect specifications in 10 seconds, either.
In my experience, it doesn’t matter how good or detailed the prompt is—after enough lines of code, the LLM starts making design decisions for you.
This is why I don’t accept LLM completions for anything that isn’t short enough to quickly verify that it is implemented exactly as I would have myself. Usually, that’s boilerplate code.
> This is why I don’t accept LLM completions for anything that isn’t short enough to quickly verify that it is implemented exactly as I would have myself. Usually, that’s boilerplate code.
^ This. This is where I've landed as far as the extent of LLM coding assistants for me.
I've seen very long prompts that are as long as a school essay and those didn't take ten seconds either
To some extent those fail in the same category of cheaters that put way more effort into cheating an exam than doing it properly. Or people paying 10/15 bucks a month to access a private Usenet server to download pirate content.
The advantage of a llm in that case is that you can skip a lot of syntax: make a LOT of typos in your spec, even pseudo code, will result in a working program. Not so with code. Also small logjcal mistakes, messing up left/right, x/y etc are auto fixed, maybe to your frustration if they were not mistakes, but often they are and you won't notice as they are indeed just repaired for you.
No, but the better specifications you provide to your “development team”, the more likely you are to get what you expected… like always.