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Comment by koreth1 | Hacker News Reader

> My prompts are long and complex, with a paragraph or two about the general objective followed by 15 to 20 numbered requirements. Often I'll include existing functions the new code needs to work with, or functions that must be refactored to handle the new requirements.

I guess this is a tough request if you're working on a proprietary code base, but I would love to see some concrete examples of the prompts and the code they produce.

I keep trying this kind of prompting with various LLM tools including GPT-4 (haven't tried Gemini Ultra yet, I admit) and it nearly always takes me longer to explain the detailed requirements and clean up the generated code than it would have taken me to write the code directly.

But plenty of people seem to have an experience more like yours, so I really wonder whether (a) we're just asking it to write very different kinds of code, or (b) I'm bad at writing LLM-friendly requirements.

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Not OP but here is a verbatim prompt I put into these LLMs. I'm learning to make flutter apps, and I like to try make various UIs so I can learn how to compose some things. I agree that Gemini Ultra (aka the paid "advanced" mode) is def better than ChatGPT-4 for this prompt. Mine is a bit more terse than OP's huge prompt with numbered requirements, but I still got a super valid and meaningful response from Gemini, while GPT4 told me it was a tricky problem, and gave me some generic code snippets, that explicitly don't solve the problem asked.

> I'm building a note-taking app in flutter. I want to create a way to link between notes (like a web hyperlink) that opens a different note when a user clicks on it. They should be able to click on the link while editing the note, without having to switch modalities (eg. no edit-save-view flow nor a preview page). How can I accomplish this?

I also included a follow-up prompt after getting the first answer, which again for Gemini was super meaningful, and already included valid code to start with. Gemini also showed me many more projects and examples from the broader internet.

> Can you write a complete Widget that can implement this functionality? Please hard-code the note text below: <redacted from HN since its long>

This is useful, thanks. Since you're using this for learning, would it be fair to characterize this as asking the LLM to write code you don't already know how to write on your own?

I've definitely had success using LLMs as a learning tool. They hallucinate, but most often the output will at least point me in a useful direction.

But my day-to-day work usually involves non-exploratory coding where I already know exactly how to do what I need. Those are the tasks where I've struggled to find ways to make LLMs save me any time or effort.

> would it be fair to characterize this as asking the LLM to write code you don't already know how to write on your own?

Yea absolutely. I also use it to just write code I understand but am too lazy to write, but it's definitely effective at "show me how this works" type learning too.

> Those are the tasks where I've struggled to find ways to make LLMs save me any time or effort

Github CoPilot has an IDE integration where it can output directly into your editor. This is great for "// TODO: Unit Test for add(x, y) method when x < 0" and it'll dump out the full test for you.

Similarly useful for things like "write me a method that loops through a sorted list, and finds anything with <condition> and applies a transformation and saves it in a Map". Basically all those random helper methods and be written for you.

That last one is an interesting example. If I needed to do that, I would write something like this (in Kotlin, my daily-driver language):

    fun foo(list: List<Bar>) =
        list.filter { condition(it) }.associateWith { transform(it) }

which would take me less time to write than the prompt would.

However, if I didn't know Kotlin very well, I might have had to go look in the docs to find the associateWith function (or worse, I might not have even thought to look for it) at which point the prompt would have saved me time and taught me that the function exists.

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