To me, this is a great illustration of why chat is a terrible interface for a coding tool. I've gone down this path as well, learning that you need to have a detailed prompt that establishes a lot of context, and iteratively improve it to generate better code. And yup, generating a task list and working from that is definitely a key strategy for getting GPT to do anything bigger than a few paragraphs.
But compare that to Copilot: Copilot doesn't help much when you're starting from scratch, and there's nothing for it to work with. But once you have a bit of structure, it starts to make recommendations. Rather than generating large chunks of code, the recommendations are small, chunks of a few lines or maybe even one line at a time. And it's sooooo good at picking up on patterns. As soon as you start something with built-in symmetries, it'll quickly generate all the permutations. It's sort of prompting by pointing.
This is so. much. better. than writing prompt for the chat interface. I'm really excited to see where these kinds of tools lead.
But compare that to Copilot: Copilot doesn't help much when you're starting from scratch, and there's nothing for it to work with. But once you have a bit of structure, it starts to make recommendations. Rather than generating large chunks of code, the recommendations are small, chunks of a few lines or maybe even one line at a time. And it's sooooo good at picking up on patterns. As soon as you start something with built-in symmetries, it'll quickly generate all the permutations. It's sort of prompting by pointing.
This is so. much. better. than writing prompt for the chat interface. I'm really excited to see where these kinds of tools lead.