Hacker News Reader

Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

> Look at my drafts that were started within the last three months and then check that I didn’t publish them on simonwillison.net using a search against content on that site and then suggest the ones that are most close to being ready

This is a very detailed, particular prompt. The type of prompt a programmer would think of as they were trying to break down a task into something that can be implemented. It is so programmer-brained that I come away not convinced that a typical user would be able to write it.

This isn’t an AI skepticism post - the fact that it handles the prompt well is very impressive. But I’m skeptical that the target user is thinking clearly enough to prompt this well.

View on HN

Since LLMs were introduced, I've been of the belief that this technology actually makes writing a *more* important skill to develop than less. So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

There may be a future AI-based system that can retain so much context it can kind of just "get what you mean" when you say off-the-cuff things, but I believe that a user that can think, speak, and write clearly will still have a skill advantage over one that does not.

FWIW, I've heard many people say that with voice dictation they ramble to LLMs and by speaking more words can convey their meaning well, even if their writing quality is low. I don't do this regularly, but when I have tried it, it seemed to work just as well as my purposefully-written prompts. I can imagine a non-technical person rambling enough that the AI gets what they mean.

Thats a fair counterpoint, and it has helped translate my random thoughts into more coherent text. I also haven't taken advantage of dictation much at all either, so maybe I'll give it a try. I still think the baseline skill that writing gives you translates to an LLM-use skill, which is thinking clearly and knowing how to structure your thoughts. Maybe folks can get that skill in other ways (oration, art, etc.). I don't need to give it essays, but I do need to give it clear instructions. Every time it spins off and does something I don't want, its because I didn't clarify my thoughts correctly.

The prompt the user enters is actually not the prompt. Most agents will have an additional background step to use the user's prompt to generate the actual, detailed instructions, which is then used as the actual prompt for code generation. That's how the ability to build a website from "create a website that looks like twitter" is achieved.

Setting up SpeechNote with Kokoro is one of the the best things I've ever done.

I can speak faster than I type, and the flow state is much smoother when you can just dump a stream of consciousness into the context window in a matter of seconds. And the quality of the model is insane for something that runs locally, on reasonable hardware no less.

Swearing at an LLM is also much more fun when done verbally.

> No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we had a way of writing very precise language that is easy for a machine to interpret!

Yeah, we've already seen that over the past few decades. It's both a limitation and a benefit, but until recently it was the only thing we had (well that, and just hiring another person to act as an LLM for us). LLMs are an upgrade.

My 85 year-old father could probably resolve 90% of his personal technology problems using an LLM. But for the same reason every phone call on these subjects ends with me saying "can it wait until I come over for lunch next week to take a look?", an LLM isn't a viable solution when he can't adequately describe the problem and its context.

I showed my father how to use the live camera mode with Gemini and it's been a boon for him

> So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

I've heard it well described as a k-type curve. Individuals that already know things will use this tool to learn and do many more things. Individuals that don't know a whole lot aren't going to learn or do a whole lot with this tool.

It is absolutely true, with the interesting caveat that the basic (spelling grammar) doesn’t matter. Clarity and detail of your ideas do.

> No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

This definitely agrees with my experience. But a corollary is that written human language is very cumbersome to encode some complex concepts. More and more I give up on LLM-assisted programming because it is easier to express my desires in code than using English to describe what forms I want to see in the produced code. Perhaps once LLMs get something akin to judgement and wisdom I can express my desires in the terms I can use with other experienced humans and take for granted certain obvious quality aspects I want in the results.

I agree 100% - it's a very programmer-coded prompt. It was pretty much the first thing I thought to try.

I expect we'll see an enormous quantity of "cool prompts to try in Cowork" content show up over the next few months, which makes sense - regular non-programmers will benefit enormously from cookbooks and prompting guides and other tools to help them figure out what they can ask this thing.

Can you try a simpler less programmery version?

"are any of my recent blog drafts unpublished and nearly ready to go?"

Why choosing to publish on substack, which is owned by a techno-fascist ? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...

What internet company isn't run by those types?

I don't publish on Substack, I publish on my own site: https://simonwillison.net

I use Substack as a free email provider for the email newsletter copy of my blog - which saves me hundreds of dollars a month in email fees.

"Why publish on Substack, a venture‑backed tech platform whose leadership has chosen a permissive moderation policy?" fixed it for you.

This is essentially the "future of work"TM - those who can define prompts will be poised best for the future.

It takes a certain amount of expertise to use LLMs effectively. And I know that some people claim otherwise but they simply aren't worth listening to.

Just because Claude Cowork is for "other" kinds of work, not just software engineering, doesn't in any way change that. It's not like other kinds of knowledge work aren't being done by intelligent professionals who invest time into learning how to use complicated software and systems

That is to say, I don't know who the "target user" of this is, but it is a $100/month subscription, so it's presumably someone who is a pretty serious AI user.

This is why I think (at least given the current state of AI code generators) that senior engineers will benefit more from AI than less experienced engineers. I don't know exactly what the chart of experience (on the x-axis) and amount of productivity gain from AI (on the y-axis) will look like, but I'm pretty sure it will be roughly (given suitable error bars around the input) a monotonically increasing function.

The notion that people who aren't developers couldn't figure out how to use this tool well, or be trained to, is a little too negative. Programmers aren't special snowflakes. Everyone with a brain is capable of describing a problem and breaking the solution into steps.

The popularity of LLMs proves this. That's how most people use them - building up a detailed prompt in steps, and learning how to put more detail in to get the result you want.

One part I like about LLMs is that they can smooth over the rough edges in programming. Lots of people can build pretty complicated spreadsheets, can break down a problem into clear discrete tasks, or can at least look at a set of steps and validate that solves the issue they have & more easily updated it. Those people don’t necessarily know json isn’t a person, how to install python or how to iterate over these things. I cant give directions in Spanish but its not because I don’t know how to get to the library its just I can’t translate precisely.

Also you may only need someone to write the meta prompt that then spits out this kind of thing given some problem “I want to find the easiest blog posts to finish in my drafts but some are already published” then a more detailed prompt out of it, read it and set things going.

> But I’m skeptical that the target user is thinking clearly enough to prompt this well.

Over time, target users will learn to think and communicate this way. As this is what tools will demand of them.

Eh, most people never learned how to google.

Select star from blog posts where... :)

But that's how literally all software adoption curves work...

The 1980's version of simonw was explaining to people how to use Excel, too.

(though 40 years later, things are still pretty bad on the Excel front, hah)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com