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romlandHNSource authorApr 18, 2023

Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I started a bit of an exploration around prompts and code a week or three back

I started a bit of an exploration around prompts and code a week or three back. I want to figure out the down/up-sides and create tools for myself around it. So, for this project (a game), I decided "for fun" to try to not write any code myself, and avoid narrow prompts that would just feed me single functions for a very specific purpose. The LLM should be responsible for this, not me! It's pretty painful since I still have to debug and understand the potential garbage I was given and after understanding what is wrong, get rid of it, and change/add to the prompt to get new code. Very often completely new code[1]. Rinse and repeat until I have what I need. The above is a contrived scenario, but it does give some interesting insights. A nice one is that since here is one or more prompts connected to all the code (and its commit), the intention of the code is very well documented in natural language. The commit history creates a rather nice story that I would not normally get in a repository. …

Original discussionAn example of LLM prompting for programming 261 source comments · at import

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sk0gHNApr 18, 2023

That's a beautiful readme, starred! Out of curiosity, right now would you say you have saved time by (almost) exclusively prompting instead of typing the code up yourself? Do you see that trending in another direction as the project progresses?

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celeritasceleryHNApr 18, 2023

That is really interesting experiment! I have so many questions. - do you feel like this could be a viable work model for real projects? I recognize it will most likely be more effective to balance LLM code with hand written code in the real world. - some of your prompts are really long. Do you feel like the code you get out of the LLM is worth the effort you put in? - given that the code returned is often wrong, do you feel like you could feasible for someone who knows little to no code? - it seems like you already know well all the technology behind what you are building (I.e. you know how to write a game in js). Do you think you could do this without already having that background knowledge? - how many times do you have to refine a prompt before you get something that is worth committing?

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