Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Most of my initial prompts to agents start with "DO NOT WRITE ANY CODE YET."

I like asking for the plan of action first, what does it think to do before actually do any edits/file touching.



I’ve also had success writing documentation ahead of time (keeping these in a separate repo as docs), and then referencing it for various stages. The doc will have quasi-code examples of various features, and then I can have a models stubbed in one pass, failing tests in the next, etc.

But there’s a guiding light that both the LLM and I can reference.


Sometimes I wonder if pseudocode could be better for prompting than expressive human language, because it can follow a structure and be expressive but constrained -- have you seen research on this and whether this an effective technique?


I had good success with prompting using the fully complete code.



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: