If it cannot give you a good output with very little prompting, it’s a sign your problem probably isn’t something well known and it probably needs a human touch.
I think this gets to the core of the problem with LLM workflows and why there are so many disagreements about effectiveness
Maybe I overestimate my skills or underestimate how long things would take, but I am constantly feeling like when I try to use AI it takes more time, not less
My suspicion is that if you could create a second version of me, give one copy of them an LLM and one copy solves the problem normally, this would be the case
But many people love these tools and feel more productive, so what gives? The problem it is impossible to really measure because we don't have convenient parallel universe clones to test against. It's all just vibes and made up numbers
There seem to be multiple approaches to working with LLMs. My own personal experience has been that carefully explaining my request, providing specific and highly relevant context (and avoiding irrelevant and distracting context) has lead to significant productivity on my side. That is, it may take me 15 minutes to prepare a really good prompt but the output can save me hours of work. Conversely, if I fire of a bunch of low-effort prompts I get poor results and I end up spending a lot of time in back-and-forth with the LLM and a lot of time fixing up its output.