Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?
7 unsupp0rted 4 8/4/2025, 5:39:59 PM
Every week for the last 3 months I’ve learned a new trick when it comes to getting whatever LLM I’m using at the time to produce better output. That’s my trade, but lots of HNers have more interesting trades than that.
In my case, only recently I learned the value of getting an LLM to write and refine a plan.md architecture doc first, and for it to break that doc down into testable phases, and then to implement phase by phase.
Seems obvious in hindsight. But it took too long to learn that that should be my approach. I had been going phase by phase myself- no overarching plan.md for the LLM.
What Trick of the Trade took you too long to learn?
Comments (4)
oumua_don17 · 2m ago
Start as early as possible in investing (in index funds) and otherwise being financially savvy. It is very beneficial to realise early on that growing your hard earned money and spending it wisely is way more important as it will in the future lead to some unexpected benefits. Freedom of thought and action!
zappb · 48m ago
Writing tests first is a good way to end up with testable code. If you skip that, retrofitting tests is incredibly difficult.
vouaobrasil · 2h ago
I only learned this in the last five years: do less, automate less, do more by hand, and use the limited capability of the manual method to really choose projects that are worthwile, rather than aim for maximum efficiency.
entrepy123 · 1h ago
How do you maintain tests, in order for LLM edits to not keep breaking things?
To answer the OP, I learned use different models for reasoning vs. coding.