I've a similar history of AI use as you but every so often I simply describe what I want and try out what it creates. Honestly in these past 2 years the pace of improvement has been stunning.
Yesterday I was inside one of the tools that a just build it prompt created and I asked it to use a NewType pattern for some of the internals.
It wasn't until I was in bed that I thought why? If I'm never reading that code and the agent doesn't benefit from it? Why am I dragging my cognitive baggage into the code base?
Would a future lay vibe coder care what a New type pattern is? Why it helps? Who it helps?
I think the pedagogy of programming will change so that effective prompting will be more accessible.
I do think about this a lot. On the one hand, you might be right, and it may not matter at all. On the other, we often do that kind of stuff because it makes it harder to slip up by accident and/or makes the code easier to read and understand. These things are surely helpful to AI agents in the same way that they are useful to people?
I guess it depends on whether the extra time you could invest in that kind of thing pays back in terms of context windows, code quality or speed of AI code generation.
Yesterday I was inside one of the tools that a just build it prompt created and I asked it to use a NewType pattern for some of the internals.
It wasn't until I was in bed that I thought why? If I'm never reading that code and the agent doesn't benefit from it? Why am I dragging my cognitive baggage into the code base?
Would a future lay vibe coder care what a New type pattern is? Why it helps? Who it helps?
I think the pedagogy of programming will change so that effective prompting will be more accessible.