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Comment by orthogonal_cube | Hacker News Reader

No. Prompting is Project Management. You’re setting expectations for what you want and waiting to see what the model provides. You may be learning to articulate things well enough for the specific model you’ve chosen to produce the output you want, but it’s not programming. Only when you manipulate the code is it programming.

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It's pair programming. It's definitely not project management because, to build anything useful, I need to know everything I needed to know as a software engineer before AI hit the mainstream. A PM who isn't an experienced engineer could probably come up with the bones of an app, but the app would suck.

Programming as I remember it pre-AI was essentially just toil and iteration. Programming with AI is nearly zero toil and iteration. The first prompt is like installing a framework. The next 200 prompts are programming.

What role would you assign the “going over the new code with a fine-toothed comb and fixing all of the garbage it’s made, but doing so by talking it through where you’re seeing complexity, asking it to review for that same complexity throughout the rest of its change, etc”?

Yeah, kinda, I guess. It's different from Project Management though, because a lot of that was also managing people and expectations (both the stakeholders and the team).

Writing a really good skill, or a spec document, feels more like programming than Project Management.

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