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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

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malfist·

> You just have to get the high level design right, or explicitly ask it critique your design before building it.

Do you think people are not giving their agents specs and asking for input?

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A thing I've noticed is that everyone thinks they prompt better than the next guy.

This. I have this buddy, who is not an idiot by stretch of the imagination and more adventurous than me in some ways ( I don't really run agents on my machine ), but when I was looking at his prompts, I sometimes question how he gets anything done at all. It is vague and angry demands.

Not sure about the angry part, but vague sometimes works really good. The important part is to have enough good context pushed into the context window beforehand (codebase explorations, docs, etc). Then a vague prompt of the general direction gives the autocomplete more “freedom” to figure out the “best” approach given the context.

Doesn’t work well ofc in a one shot situation with no context.

Yeah, sorry, I myself was being vague, because I don't want to give any identifying info even by mistake. You are right; generalizations here are not as useful. I was talking about something the lines of 'can you make it better', but without llm having the context to understand what better could potentially mean. For brainstorming sessions, I love to start broad. Admittedly, I have limited experience with agents ( though current project intends to bridge that gap ) so it is possible I am missing something ( plus, to your point, I don't know his full setup ).

Very often, no.

The ones who end up with messes, no

Maybe the professional devs, but not the vibecoders

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