I do think you have a point about it being most useful for trivial or boilerplate problems but it’s still very useful as there is always much of that.
I'm currently writing a demo that I'll present next week using Jetpack Compose, and it's a UI toolkit I'm not really familiar with, so it's been really helpful for that. In fact, I have a tool that is almost like a build system that compiles English language spec files down to the code, and then allows me to edit them and to continue to work with the AI by just changing the spec and the code simultaneously. That's been really tremendously effective, especially with GPT-4.
On the other hand, for working on my main product, it's pretty useless because all of that work is debugging and making a lot of small changes all over the code base, which is too advanced for it currently. And I think that will get solved, but it isn't solved yet.
BTW the above paragraphs were dictated using the Whisper API. I didn't change a single thing about it. Whisper is just as impressive and useful as the LLMs, in my view.
I’m curious because it seems like perhaps providing longer, detailed prompts (and then iterating) might be the best approach for getting coding help.
Thoughts?
Remember to tell it is an expert XYZ programmer, that will actually make it produce better code.
iterative is best approach. I add one feature at a time. I also provide the errors/exceptions for fixing.