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AI Coding Tip 019 - Tell the AI Why, Not Just What

DEV Community·Maxi Contieri·21 days ago
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State your reasons before your prompt and the AI will solve the right problem. TL;DR: Tell the AI your reason before your request to get solutions that match your real constraints. Common Mistake ❌ You send commands to the AI without context. "Refactor this." "Optimize this query." "Add error handling." The AI complies, but returns a generic (and probably hallucinated) solution that solves the average case, not your specific one. You spend the next three messages correcting the trade-offs you never mentioned. Problems Addressed 😔 The LLM has dozens of valid solutions for any request and picks the most statistically common one without your context . You get correct (but wrong) results: technically valid code that doesn't fit your constraints. You iterate more than necessary because the AI guessed wrong about what mattered. The model makes trade-offs you didn't intend, favoring speed when you needed readability. When the AI doesn't know the constraint, it can't explain why it chose a specific approach.…

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