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I have briefly played with chatGPT. I don’t understand how you refine a program specification. I tell chatGPT what I want in a few words. It prints out a couple

I have briefly played with chatGPT. I don’t understand how you refine a program specification. I tell chatGPT what I want in a few words. It prints out a couple hundred lines of code that kind of work but not quite how I want it. So I delete the code and then rephrase with more detail. This time I exceed the 4k character input limit. Repeat above trying to cram more detail into 4k characters. I often have better luck being more general and hoping for the best. My example case has been managing a list of items where each item has some properties. I’m after a simple CRUD backed by xml.

objectivetruth 4y ago
It took me a few attempts, but I have gotten this to work fairly well. I started with explaining my ideal app like this: We're going to design a (language) application that performs the following tasks, delineated by semi-colons: Then I listed about a dozen high-level user stories, separated by semi-colons, and ended the list with a period. Then I clarified my instructions like this: We will design each step together, where you ask me for any specifications needed to complete the step and I respond with those specfications. When you feel we have completed designing a step, ask me if I have any questions before proceeding to the next step. It started with a high-level recap of my user stories, asked if I was ready to proceed, and then began to describe the first step. Over about two hours of back-and-forth, I ended up with a 20-page document of high-level architecture interspersed with code samples, db schema samples, and answers to questions that popped up during the "discussion." And I got about halfway to a working prototype during those two hours. BLEW me away how well it worked.