Simon Willison’s Weblog

In essence a language model changes you from a programmer who writes lines of code, to a programmer that manages the context the model has access to, prunes irrelevant things, adds useful material to context, and writes detailed specifications. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you won't enjoy it.

Think about it as if it is a junior developer that has read every textbook in the world but has 0 practical experience with your specific codebase, and is prone to forgetting anything but the most recent hour of things you've told it. What do you want to tell that intern to help them progress?

Eg you might put sticky notes on their desk to remind them of where your style guide lives, what the API documentation is for the APIs you use, some checklists of what is done and what is left to do, etc.

But the intern gets confused easily if it keeps accumulating sticky notes and there are now 100 sticky notes, so you have to periodically clear out irrelevant stickies and replace them with new stickies.

— Liz Fong-Jones, thread on Bluesky