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It must have something to do with the way your wife is prompting. I've noticed this with my friends too. I usually get working code from Gemini 2.5 Pro on the first try, and with a couple of follow-up prompts, it often improves significantly, while my friends seem to struggle communicating their ideas to the AI and get worse results.

Good news: Prompting is a skill you can develop.

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Is there a website with off the shelf prompts that work?

Or we can just learn to write it ourselves in the same amount of time /shrug

If you're going to need scripts like that every week - sure. If you need it once a year on average... not likely. There's a huge amount of things we could learn but do them so infrequently that we outsource it to other people.

Right.

This is one case where I've found writing code with LLMs to be effective.

With some unfamiliar tool I don't care about too much (e.g. GitHub Actions YAML or some build script), I just want it to work, & then focus on other things.

I can spend time to try and come up with something that works; something that's robust & idiomatic.. but, likely I won't be able to re-use that knowledge before I forget it.

With an LLM, I'll likely get just as good a result; or if not, will have a good starting point to go from.

You can't.

Not with that attitude.

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