Simon Willison:
I call it my weird intern. I’ll say to my wife, Natalie, sometimes, “Hey, so I got my weird intern to do this.” And that works, right?
It’s a good mental model for these things as well, because it’s like having an intern who has read all of the documentation and memorized the documentation for every programming language, and is a wild conspiracy theorist, and sometimes comes up with absurd ideas, and they’re massively overconfident.
It’s the intern that always believes that they’re right. But it’s an intern who you can, I hate to say it, you can kind of bully them.
You can be like, “Do it again, do that again.” “No, that’s wrong.” And you don’t have to feel guilty about it, which is great!
Or one of my favorite prompts is you just say, “Do better.” And it works. It’s the craziest thing. It’ll write some code, you say, “Do better.” And it goes, “Oh, I’m sorry, I should…”
And then it will churn out better code, which is so stupid that that’s how this technology works. But it’s kind of fun.