You’re not providing a key piece of information to provide you with an answer: what were the prompts you used? You can share your sessions via URL.
A prompt like “Write a $x program that does $y” is generally going to produce some pretty poor code. You generally want to include a lot of details and desires in your prompt. And include something like “Ask clarifying questions until you can provide a good solution”.
A lot of the people who complain about poor code generation use poor prompting.
Prompt engineering isn't really that important anymore imo. If you're using a reasoning model, you can see if it understood your request by reading the reasoning trace.
That's a very dangerous thought. Prompt engineering evolved is just clear and direct communication. That's a hard thing to get right when talking to people. Heck, personally I can have a hard time with clear and coherent internal dialog. When I am working with models and encounter unexpected results, it often boils down to the model giving me what I asked for instead of what I want. I've never met anyone who always knows exactly what they want and is able to articulate it with perfect clarity. Some of the models are surprisingly good at figuring out intent, but complexity inevitably requires additional context. Whether you are working with a model or a person, or even your future self, you must spend time developing and articulating clear specifications, that is prompt engineering. Furthermore, models don't "think" like people--there's technique in how you struture specifications for optimal results.
Fair enough. I guess I was mainly thinking of how rarely I need to utilise the old prompt engineering techniques. Stuff like: "You are an expert software developer...", "you must do this or people will die." etc
I just tell the AI what I want, with sufficient context. Then, I check the reasoning trace to check it understood what I wanted. You need to be clear in your prompts, sure, but I don't really see it as "prompt engineering" any more.
There a many ways to do something wrong and few ways to do them right. It's on the AI advocates to show us session logs so we can all see how it's done right.
A prompt like “Write a $x program that does $y” is generally going to produce some pretty poor code. You generally want to include a lot of details and desires in your prompt. And include something like “Ask clarifying questions until you can provide a good solution”.
A lot of the people who complain about poor code generation use poor prompting.