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Shawn Wang: uncertainty

22 Aug 2023 Latent Space Cursor.so: The AI-first Code Editor — with Aman Sanger of Anysphere

“If it's unclear what environment or library versions I'm working with that might significantly change your answer, please ask me to clarify.”

— Shawn Wang

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Speaker
Shawn Wang
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
uncertainty
Recorded
22 Aug 2023
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…It's a little frustrating because I think it's really useful for code, right? Because when you can do stuff in the middle of the line, it's impossible to do that with the chat format. But with the completion format, it becomes trivial. So one thing I learned from working with Jesse on GPT 4 OpenAI, he always asked GPT to comment your code before writing the code. And that's the chain of thought for code, right? So when I ask you for code, give me a fully commented code with only a brief explanation on how it works, bias towards the most efficient solution and offer an alternative implementation if it fits. If it's unclear what environment or library versions I'm working with that might significantly change your answer, please ask me to clarify. That's my custom instructions right now for code. And I'm just like, hey, we should come together as a community and just share these custom instructions or system prompts. Yeah. When you get it to be more verbose, I do worry a bit in terms of UX because more tokens means it takes a lot longer to get to the answer. And then it's also just, I don't want to read a massive answer. I just often want the answer immediately, or I just want kind of a short block of code to answer that. That is a trade off you kind of will have to deal with. And the same thing with diffs, right? Where the diffs are going to be so much faster if you get them to work, but it's just going to result in lower quality edits.…

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