Hacker News Reader

Comment by COAGULOPATH | Hacker News Reader

>I had to be very specific and write a few long and detailed prompts for the more complex parts of a the application.

This is my experience. You still have to understand programming: you're just typing it out in Natural English.

Conversely, doing so has helped me flesh out my thoughts on many occasions. As I ran into obstacles with errors or imprecise prompting, I realized my design had issues or edge cases I hadn’t take into account. Perhaps it would be better if I wrote out several paragraphs describing my intentions before taking up most coding tasks, but I hardly think my boss would be in support of this!

Like a rubber duck which provides feedback. but since it's coming from a rubber duck it's good to verify that duck knows what it's talking about.

> Perhaps it would be better if I wrote out several paragraphs describing my intentions before taking up most coding tasks

I often do things like this, and if the scale of the document was somewhat larger than you describe, it would be a design document.

My role unfortunately doesn’t allow for this. I do more “in the trenches” data science stuff. The value is quite obvious to me for a role where there is more space for this or in product planning.

Yes exactly. I had to be very specific and tackle the project in the same way I would if I was fully writing the code. First data schema, then models, then controllers with CRUD and views, then routes, then authentication, then test cases, then TS transpiling, etc...

It's definitely not something someone with zero coding experience could easily do, and I feel even a junior developer would struggle with anything even as complex as this. You have to have the concept and structure in your head, it's just writing the code for it.

> You have to have the concept and structure in your head, it's just writing the code for it.

I wonder how far you'd get with the technique of asking ChatGPT to lay out its plans first, kind of like the improvements in math questions you see when you ask it to write down its reasoning before committing to any answer.

"This is what I'm looking for: XXX. What are the different pieces of this that I'm going to need to create?"

"Ok, the first thing on your list you gave me was a database to store the data. What would the structure of that database look like?"

"Can you give me the code to create that database?"

Etc etc. i.e putting the actual code as the last step each time.

This is the best form of prompting for generating code. You tell it to first generate a technical spec for solving the stated problem problem, consider multiple options, return for your review. You then use a trigger command like “build” to then implement, once you’ve specified any changes.

I suspect it would work surprisingly well! But still, I think you would have to have a fairly good concept of coding to do even that. For example, my mum who has zero concept of what a database is (beyond the dictionary definition) would not be able to piece together an application like this (sorry mum!). But a junior developer would probably be able to just about do it depending on complexity.

For me, using GPT felt very slow, but for a junior it might actually be faster than trial/error and Googling. Also, ChatGPT is only going to get better and better, so we can expect it to become quicker and easier to do such things.

That's a great fit for scenarios where you do know programming but don't know the particular language and framework on which you suddenly have to do some maintenance or improvement.

For many things the available documentation is poor, and asking a bot is much more helpful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com