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Putting the structure and thinking behind something you have in your head into plain but *precise* English is very hard actually, so I'm not too sure this is a good way to interact with a coding AI, honestly.

>"Here's what I want for the macro system:
>[explicit control flow description]
>[clear data structure spec]
>"it should call the same functions that are called when the user presses a key"
>NOT STATED: The implicit assumptions about what to do when you hit a minor ambiguous spot in the implementation

The AI:
>"I should ignore the data structure spec and make a different thing for macro files that then gets converted to spec at runtime"
>"The user said an optional time field for each function in the macro list? He must mean that it's a delay between the last and this call, even though he explicitly states that the last call is pop()ed from the fucking list after running so there would be no way to calculate if the delay A to B is elapsed, because again, I received a spec that explicitly fucking removes A from memory.
>"He said to roll macro processing into the key handling? Let me forget that ten lines in and instead put it outside and before the key handling"

I think I should try to talk to it entirely in pseudocode. At least it can infer the implicit design from my code's layout then.
The question is how much I gain by doing that instead of just coding myself. I don't learn, I miss out on understanding my program at all times, and the closer I get to just writing code, the less time I gain from not writing it myself.

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I don't even know if this post articulates what the problem is. It is REALLY hard to get the AI to understand what you're going for.
So many things were obvious to me that the AI then understood differently. I am unsure about the total amount of stuff that I will have to explain, that I wouldn't if I was coding myself...
what % of the total length of the code I would write is that?

Doing smaller steps only mitigates it somewhat. At a certain point the steps are so small you could just write them yourself incrementally...
>Putting the structure and thinking behind something you have in your head into plain but *precise* English is very hard actually

That's actually the key activity in sw development. Figuring out the structure, thinking through the various paths and describing everything precisely.

The macro system prompt above is basically vibe coding. What works for me is thinking shit through myself and then prompting for contained parts with detail. It's really just a slightly higher-level language that takes care of boilerplate itself. That usually produces reasonably good results a bit faster, without too much facepalming and reworking.
>The macro system prompt above is basically vibe coding.
You understanding it like this is case in point for
>describing things is hard
I forgot the square brackets around [exlicit control flow], meaning I explicitly described what control flow I wanted to the AI.

>the key activity is describing the thing you want in English
I always thought it was describing the thing you want in the programming language...
>takes care of boilerplate itself
I guess my point here is that sometimes I am close to writing more English boilerplate to get the thing to understand what I obviously mean here (I claim: I need more for the robot than I would for another human, compared to ZERO for myself and less than I would need in the programming language rather than English for another person to get it, still)

Writing English for an LLM feels like writing Java.
@WandererUber the problem isn't your lack of precision, it's that nigger normies have infested all of programming and saturated the training data with their nigger normie mindset which your thinking diverges from.
i once gave it the source code for sowm and told it to rewrite it to maintain all the same functionality but to use tags instead of workspaces. it instead bloated the codebase to 3x its original size, adding a heaping pile of useless "feechurz" i did not need or want.