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Comment by wg0 | Hacker News Reader

Noobs are burning tokens like "make me an app that does this" whereas an experienced engineer would go with certain language, framework and architecture in mind.

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How exactly does specifying the language, framework, and architecture in advance save a meaningful amount of tokens? I'd expect saying "make me an app" and "make me an app using Swift and SwiftUI" would be pretty close in terms of token usage. You save maybe one look up by the LLM for "what is the preferred language for writing an application for iOS?".

That's obviously pretty specific to iOS - or MacOS - where there's a single blessed path. Elsewhere, especially in web dev, unless you really don't care about what you get or are making something very simple, you better be ready to provide specifics.

Even still, the majority of things being built on the web perform largely the same if it's being built in Ruby or Rust or Node or Go. Only very niche things, that an LLM would probably fumble over anyway, really benefit from picking the perfect language/framework. The only real advantage to naming your language in the initial prompt is that you can be assured that you'll be able to understand the code when the GPU spins down and output is in front of you.

> you'll be able to understand the code

This should always be a goal. Doing anything major without being able to review manually is just asking for pain over time, or be ready to feed more and more tokens to the fire to reduce sloppiness.

"Make me a ticketing system like Jira"

Now this prompt has huge variety of implementation details. Language? PHP/Ruby/Python/Java/Typescript? In each of them then there are tons of frameworks, templating engines, ORMs, database servers, frontend tooling, bundler, frontend framework alone has several dozen candidates from React, Preact, Vue, Svelte and what not.

So if you really know your craft, you'll already be knowing what specific implementation you need so let us not discount the existing expertise here.

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