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Comment by only-one1701 | Hacker News Reader

I use (and like) AI, but “you failed the AI by not prompting correctly” strikes me as silly every time I hear it. It reminds me of the meme about programming drones where the conditional statement “if (aboutToCrash)” is followed by the block “dont()”.

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At the same time, prompt/context engineering makes them better, so it matters more than zero

Much like removing gotos automatically makes your code 1% better.

And then someone invented exceptions for the same reason we needed these. More semantics, people still cannot use them.

The semantics being opaque and the thing doing much more than you expected too. And exceptions are trivially simple in comparison!

Imho calling this engineering would be an insult to advertise engineers.

arguably it's closer to teaching / management / writing good work tickets (but overly detailed and implementation specific)

because it's for a machine, engineering seems fine to me

I've found myself slowing down on jumping into code (with the ai or not) to spend more time writing instructions & prompts. Makes a big difference

What I have come to understand is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do and it usually works well if you give it the right context and proper constraints, but never forget that it is essentially just a very smart autocomplete.

It will do exactly what you tell it to do, unless you're the first person doing "it".

Buddy, if there’s one thing I never forget and wish others didn’t either, it’s that it’s very very very helpful autocomplete.

It’s not the ai, you’re using it wrong. /s

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