In this example, setting the system prompt to something like "You are an experienced Android app developer specialising in apps for phone form factor devices" (replacing Android with iOS if needed) would get you a long way.

I think you need to think of the LLM less like a developer and more like an entire development shop. The first step is working with the user to define their goals, then to repeat it back to them in some format, then to turn it into code, and to iterate during the work with feedback. My last product development conversation with Claude included it drawing svgs of the interface and asking me if that is what I meant.

This is much like how other professional services providers don’t need you to bring them exact specs, they take your needs and translate it to specifications that producers can use - working with an architect, a product designer, etc. They assume things and then confirm them - sometimes on paper and in words, sometimes by showing you prototypes, sometimes by just building the thing.

The near to mid future of work for software engineers is in two areas in my mind:

1. Doing things no one has done before. The hard stuff. That’s a small percentage of most code, a large percentage of value generated.

2. Building systems and constraints that these automated development tools work within.

Since none of those assumptions are specified, you have no idea which of them will inexplicably change during a bugfix. You wanted that in cornflower blue instead, but now none of your settings are persisted in the backend. So you tell it to persist the backend, but now the UI is completely different. So you specify the UI more precisely, and now the backend data format is incompatible.

By the time you specify all the bits you care about, maybe you start to think about a more concise way to specify all these requirements…