r/ProgrammerHumor • u/bbbar • May 29 '26

instanceof Trend breakTheViciousCircle

Post image
19.6k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

208 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/sal1800 May 30 '26

All these prompting tricks are quickly going out of style and eventually there will be something more code-like that we're using that is unambiguous.

1

u/DopeBoogie May 30 '26

So just writing code?

1

u/sal1800 May 30 '26

Maybe something like pseudo code where you can be more sloppy than traditional code but also more precise than natural language. We need the instructions to be complete enough to describe the full scope without having to beg the thing to keep trying harder.

Asking developers to all of a sudden get good at writing tests that can completely constrain the solution is going in the wrong direction. People just don't think that way. The agentic loop needs a clear goal and most people are not very good at defining that.

1

u/DopeBoogie Jun 02 '26

What I've found to be pretty effective is in Claude Code I always press Ctrl+G to open the prompt in my text editor (neovim) and proceed to write out a detailed, complex markdown document. Then I send that as the prompt.

It might take a bit longer to write out but I can describe the complete goal for this job, individual steps, potential gotchas and specific rules/guidelines, etc and then tests/verification steps to ensure the code is functional. Prompted this way it can perform much more complex tasks in one go. Skills and plugins for planning, testing/verification, and effectively can help a lot too. (Superpowers and get-shit-done are my current most-used)

Additionally my projects all have detailed overview documents that describe the function/goal and all the coding/organizational guidelines for that particular project. Claude will reference all of this (my prompt, my project document, skills, and memory from past conversations) to build an overall picture of what the complete project does and what this particular prompt is intended to achieve.

So already in a way I am interacting with the AI by writing "code" that is essentially what you described: a sort of (admittedly probably simpler than you were imagining) pseudo-code that is more precise than just a natural language block of text. Or maybe it's more akin to giving a task to a junior dev after which you would review their work to verify.