I am falling into a pattern of treating AI coding like a drunk mid-level dev: "I saw those few paragraphs of notes you wrote up on a napkin, and stayed up late Saturday night while drinking and spat out this implementation. you like?"
So I can say to myself, "No, do not like. But the overall gist at least started in the right direction, so I can revise it from here and still be faster than had I done it myself on Monday morning."
The most useful thing I've found is "I need to do X, show me 3 different popular libraries that do it". I've really limited my AI use to "Lady's Illustrated Primer" especially after some bad experiences with AI code from devs who should know better.
I don't even frame my requests conversationally. They usually read like brief demands, sometimes just comma delimited technologies followed by a goal. Works fine for me, but I also never prompt anything that I don't already understand how to do myself. Keeps the cart behind the horse.
I've started putting in my system prompt "keep answers brief and don't talk in the first/second person". Gets rid of all the annoying sycophancy and stops it from going on for ten paragraphs. I can ask for more details when I need it.
I am falling into a pattern of treating AI coding like a drunk mid-level dev: "I saw those few paragraphs of notes you wrote up on a napkin, and stayed up late Saturday night while drinking and spat out this implementation. you like?"
So I can say to myself, "No, do not like. But the overall gist at least started in the right direction, so I can revise it from here and still be faster than had I done it myself on Monday morning."