AI Dev Tips - Ask questions with less assumptions

February 20, 2024 at 03:22 PM

Note: This is not a blog, it's a semi-private digital garden with mostly first drafts that are often co-written with an LLM. Unless I shared this link with you directly, you might be missing important context or reading an outdated perspective.

I was a software Product Designer for many years. I’d like to believe I was good at it.

I recently asked Claude something to the effect of “Create an interactive artifact to demonstrate how the two components of entropy work together in a sample distribution.”

…and what resulted was this very creative way to use input sliders (a UI component that’s very rarely used in this way, if at all), to simultaneously view and update a distribution.

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We all get stuck in patterns that may not always serve us, especially us “experts”.

I now start with the assumption that AI is smarter than me, even at things I am very good at.

This is often an incorrect assumption, but it’s useful, because throwing away AI code is so easy.

An alternative prompt I could’ve used as an expert:

Can you create a small artifact that features bar charts of two distributions, P and Q? The purpose of the artifact is to explain why KL divergence is an asymmetric metric, using some interactive examples.
Please use intuitive names for five possible outcomes on the x-axis. Allow the user to modify the probability distributions using input boxes that sum up and normalize to one under each of the x-axis labels. Display both the calculations in both directions underneath the chart, and include some intuitive explanations for the asymmetry at the bottom.
Finally, at the very top, add some interesting presets that select two default distributions on the bar chart and highlight cases such as maximum divergence, minimum divergence, and other noteworthy scenarios.

I got to something I liked faster, but missed out on some serious extrapolative creativity.