I usually ask it to build a feature based on a specification I wrote. If it is not exactly right, it is often the case that editing it myself is faster than iterating with the ai, which has sometimes put me in an infinite loop of corrections requests. Have you encountered this too?
For me I only use it as a second opinion, I got a pretty good idea of what I want and how to do it, and I can ask any input on what I have written. This gives me the best results sofar.
At that point, you might as well write it yourself. Instead of writing 300 lines of code, you are writing 300 lines of prompts. What benefit would you get?
Its not. "Add this table, write the dto" takes 10 seconds to do. It would take me few mins probably assuming Im familiar with the language and much longer if Im not.
But its a lot better than that.
"Write this table. from here store it into table. Write endpoint to return all from the table"
I also had good luck with stuff like "scrape this page, collect x and y, download link pointed at y, store in this directory".
This only happens if you want it to one-shot stuff, or if you fall under the false belief that "it is so close, we just need to correct these three things!".
Yes I have encountered it. Narrowing focus and putting constraints and guiding it closer made the LLM agent much better at producing what I need.
It boils down to me not writing the code really. Using LLMs actually sharpened my architectural and software design skills. Made me think harder and deeper at an earlier stage.
