“I learned early on was the importance of clear, detailed communication with AI. Vague prompts often resulted in solutions that diverged from my true intentions.”
– True.
Also, a coding mindset is also necessary, because it’s you guiding the bot who helps you.
What I also found that even the best AI models can arbitrarily make syntax errors (changes my smart quotes to dumb ones without even my having asked for it or change properly working bits of code to do with slices without my asking for it) so before accepting the new edits, it’s good to go through what was changed.
Also, another tip: when you think there’s been a bog-down, take the whole code to to a different session to the same AI or maybe even another model, because it’s very hard to get out of bog-downs and the bot doesn’t seem able to forget that it must not go back to the place which led to the bog-down.
So, it’s good to keep your main objective prompts and nudging prompts to do with implementing fixes for smaller details saved and at hand for starting over in a new session.