My process right now when working LLMs is to do the following:
- Create problem and solution statement
- Create requirements and user stories
- Create architecture
- Create skeleton code
- Map the skeleton code
- Create the full code
At every step, where I don't need the full code, the LLM will start coding and I need to stop it and add "Do not generate code. The focus is still design".
This is why I built my chat app to let me manipulate LLM responses. If I feel it is not worth knowing, I'll just erase parts of it to ensure the conversation doesn't get side tracked. Or I will go back to the original user message and modify it to say
### IMPORTANT
- Do not generate more code than required.
The nice thing about LLM conversations are, every time you chat, the LLM treats it as a first time conversation, so this trick will work if the model is smart enough.
The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code. When I was younger, I would get distracted and play computer games (or comment on HN..), rather than churn out mountains of mediocre code all the time.