I think there are two kinds of uses for these tools:

1) you try to explain what you want to get done

2) you try to explain what you want to get done and how to get it done

The first one is gambling, the second one has very small failure rate, at worst, the plan it presents shows it's not getting the solution you want it to do.

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CuriouslyC 3 days ago | parent [-]

The thing is to understand that a model has "priors" which steer how it generates code. If what you're trying to build matches the priors of the model you can basically surf the gradients to working software with no steering using declarative language. If what you want to build isn't well encoded by the models priors it'll constantly drift, and you need to use shorter prompts and specify the how more (imperative).

	▲	lukaslalinsky 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		In my experience, you need shorter prompts and steering it constantly for any kind of work, novel or not. You can be doing the most basic thing, if you let it iterate long enough, it will start doing something completely stupid. It's really sad watching Gemini CLI debugging something trivial, and trying to change it "one last time" again. Fortunately, Claude is better at this, but you still need to steer it. And try extremely hard not to give it pointers to something you DON'T want it to do, especially if it's easy and in it's training set, because it will so gladly pick it up.