When I started leaning heavily into LLMs I was using really detailed documentations. Not '20 minutes of voice recordings', but my specification documents would easily hit hundreds of lines even for simple features.
The result was decent, but extremely frustrating. Because it would often deliver 80% to 90% but the final 10% to 20% it could never get right.
So, what I naturally started doing was to care less about the details of the implementation and focus on the behavior I want. And this led me to simpler prompts, to the point that I don't feel the need to create a specification document anymore. I just use the plan mode in Claude Code and it is good enough for me.
One way that I started to think about this was that really specific documentations were almost as if I was 'over-fitting' my solution over other technically viable solutions the model could come up with. One example would be if I want to sort an array, I could either ask for "sort the array" or "merge sort the array". And by forcing a merge sort I may end up with a worse solution. Admittedly sort is a pretty simple and unlikely example, but this could happen with any topic. You may ask the model to use a hash-set but a better solution would be to use a bloom filter.
Given all that, do you think investing so much time into your prompts provides a good ROI compared with the alternative of not really min-maxing every single prompt?