Comment by lbrito
It's one of those you get what you put in kind of deals.
If you spend a lot of time thinking about what you want, describing the inner workings, edge cases, architecture and library choices, and put that into a thoughtful markdown, then maybe after a couple of iterations you will get half decent code. It certainly makes a difference between that and a short "implement X" prompt.
But it makes one think - at that point (writing a good prompt that is basically a spec), you've basically solved the problem already. So LLM in this case is little more than a glorified electric typewriter. It types faster than you, but you did most of the thinking.
Right, and then after you do all the thinking and the specs, you have to read and understand and own every single line it generated. And speaking for myself, I am no where near as good at thinking through code I am reviewing as thinking through the code I am writing.
Other people will put up PRs full of code they don't understand. I'm not saying everyone who is reporting success with LLMs are doing that, but I hear it a lot. I call those people clowns, and I'd fire anyone who did that.