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Comment by andremendes | Hacker News Reader

I lost it when it finally did the right thing, but then it added a never-requested gradient to the button. Very good!

I’m impressed you had the patience to even make it that far!

I only made it through the first round of prompt selection; both options for the second step were equally pointless and not at all prompts I would ever expect to result in a constructive outcome. In my experience, telling the model it screwed up without specifically addressing, unambiguously, how to fix it, only leads to more suffering. If this page illustrates nothing else, I think it shows the immense downside of trying to use simple one or two sentence prompts.

EDIT: Actually, I used to use Google's AI Studio a lot and fork it after every successful prompt interaction. When I'd encounter a problematic issue like this, I'd revert to the previous fork and try a different prompt until I could get the desired outcome, thus mitigating the need to "argue" with the LLM. Unfortunately the ability to cleanly fork and revert everything including the LLM context was removed some months ago, and I've yet to discover a workflow with any tool that works as well for me.

> In my experience, telling the model it screwed up without specifically addressing, unambiguously, how to fix it, only leads to more suffering.

I wonder if this is just a reflection of some senior folks being arrogant towards junior folks. When the latter finished a task but not to the liking of the senior person they might just get a "that's wrong, try again". Just to have sth similar repeat the second time around. But the arrogant guy got to boss around the junior one, and some junior folks grow up learning that's how you should behave so they also do it later.

Now it's not a person but a machine. And people just make fun of the dumb machine. Well, garbage in, garbage out If you are not specific in what you want, you might get crap back. Or at least sth you didn't envision.

How is "Make the shopping button blue" not specific? Any human with a lick of digital common sense would be able to understand what I obviously mean. How am I supposed to anticipate every single way the AI could possibly misinterpret a simple fucking instruction like that?

Absolutely, the initial prompt appears sufficient. But this is about the thing screwing up and the user giving corrective instructions. Saying essentially "are you dumb" is not helpful for neither a human nor a machine if you think the original instructions should have been sufficient. Clearly they were not in that case, if you like it or not. Just repeating or being condescending is not going to help.

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