The issue with prompting is English (or any other human language) is nowhere near as rigid or strict a language as a programming language. Almost always an idea can be expressed much more succinctly in code than language.

Combine that with when you’re reading the code it’s often much easier to develop a prototype solution as you go and you end up with prompting feeling like using 4 men to carry a wheelbarrow instead of having 1 push it.

A big challenge is that programmers all have unique ever changing personal style and vision that they've never had to communicate before. As well they generally "bikeshed" and add undefined unrequested requirements, because you know someday we might need to support 10000x more users than we have. This is all well and good when the programmer implements something themselves but falls apart when it must be communicated to an LLM. Most projects/systems/orgs don't have the necessary level of detail in their documentation, documentation is fragmented across git/jira/confluence/etc/etc/etc., and it's a hodge podge of technologies without a semblance of consistency.

I think we'll find that over the next few years the first really big win will be AI tearing down the mountain of tech & documentation debt. Bringing efficiency to corporate knowledge is likely a key element to AI working within them.

I design and think upfront but I don't write it down until I start coding. I can do this for pretty large chunks of code at once.

The fastest way I can transcribe a design is with code or pseudocode. Converting it into English can be hard.

It reminds me a bit of the discussion of if you have an inner monologue. I don't and turning thoughts into English takes work, especially if you need to be specific with what you want.

> It's more design and more thinking upfront, which is something the development community has moved away from in the past ~20 years with the rise of agile development and open source.

I agree, but even smaller than thinking in agile is just a tight iteration loop when i'm exploring a design. My ADHD makes upfront design a challenge for me and I am personally much more effective starting with a sketch of what needs to be done and then iterating on it until I get a good result.

The loop of prompt->study->prompt->study... is disruptive to my inner loop for several reasons, but a big one is that the machine doesn't "think" like i do. So the solutions it scaffolds commonly make me say "huh?" and i have to change my thought process to interpet them and then study them for mistakes. My intution and iteration is, for the time being, more effective than this machine assited loop for the really "interesting" code i have to write.

But i will say that AI has been a big time saver for more mundane tasks, especially when I can say "use this example and apply it to the rest of this code/abstraction".