What can AI do?
Recently, many LLM-based AI tools have shown up. It is a great catalyst for us to improve our workflow. Personally, I have tried ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor. And I found that they really perform beyond my imaginary. With Cursor, I can build and deploy a personal blog site in one day. I’m not sure about how long would it take to help develop other applications, but I assume it can speed up development in almost every area.
So in this blog, I’d like to share some of my experiences in using AI tools.
Be specific and objective
Even though current LLM-based AIs are already powerful, they are not fully capable of finishing tasks by their own. As a user, you should guide the AI really carefully and patiently. What do I mean by that? Here is the thing, most of the AIs you can use by now are trained with numerous human language datasets, which means they are actually guessing the probability of words compositions as an answer and choosing the highest one to answer you. So they cannot understand some concepts that are clear to we humanbeings, such as ‘I want you to beautify this page’, things that are subjective is hard to understand for an AI. So make sure you provide specific needs. If you are not sure how to do so, you may just ask the AI to repeat your requirements, then you will find out which part of your requirements it doesn’t get.
Rules
If you want to use AI to help with coding. You should definitely learn to build your own rules. Rules are actually prompts. In case you have never heard of it, prompts is a prompt that the user provide to AI so that the AI can provide more specific and relevant answers. For example, if you want to build a personal website, you may tell the AI such rules:
- You are a experienced product manager, and you know exactly what are users’ needs. I’m a noob in this area, but now I want to develop my personal website, I will tell you my needs, and you will give me more detailed needs clarifications and show me some of the cases so that I can choose one to reference.
- Always answer in Chinese.
- Every time I ask you to modify the code, always confirm the requirements with me first, once I confirm, you will tell me the reason of doing so and then change the code.
See? You can’t treat the AI as a pure tool, instead, you have to treat it like a real humanbeing, but with many cross-area experience and skills.
For now, that is all I know about using AI to speed up your workflow, hope it will help you guys.