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rtpg | on: Using AI to write better code more slowly
tbh I'm just confused at why people ask AI to design features. Do you not know how to design a feature? Do you not know what you want?

This stuff works so much better when you just tell it what to do

bottlepalm | parent | next
Oh course it's not black and white, there are many shades of grey in how detailed the design of a feature can be. Often even if I know low level details, I'll only give the AI high level requirements because I want to see how it would do it. Often it comes up alternative/better ways of doing what I planned and I incorporate those ideas into the final design.
Strom | parent
The designing is the hard part. Writing code from a comprehensive design spec is a small part of the task.

So, people do know how to design a feature, but they also know it takes a lot of time and effort. They want AI to do that work for them.

rtpg | root | parent
My sample size is pretty small but when I've witnessed people (both PMs and engineers) "design through AI" I have seen two flavors:

- aimless AI wandering, leading to pretty, frankly, useless design docs

- using AI to "expand" upon a bullet pointed/shorthanded design doc. To which I feel like saying "the bullet points are already a good design doc!"

I understand that teams sometimes have specific formats that they have to make deliverables for, but having a nice 5 point bulletpoint list turn into 5 paragraphs... all for me to turn the 5 paragraphs back into 5 bullet points in my notes is depressing.

I do think you can get a lot of value in the mechanics, I just have had so much success leaving the thinking to me and the rote stuff to the AI. I'm going to have to think about the design eventually anyways right?