alt Hacker NewsDoes it work if you get the agent to throw away all of its actual implementation and start again from scratch, keeping all the learning and tests and feedback?
Gemini seems to try to get a lot of information upfront with questions and plans but people are famously bad at knowing what they want.
Maybe it should build a series of prototypes and spikes to check? If making code is cheap then why not?
This does work but it requires prompts to instruct on it. It's also not perfect, though it is pretty good.
What I've found when doing exactly this, is that the cost of the initial code makes me hesitant to throw it away. A better workflow I've been using is instead to iterate on very detailed planning documents written in markdown and repeatedly iterating on that instead (like, sometimes 50+ times for a complex app). It's really quite amazing how much that helps. It can lead to a design doc that is good enough that I can turn the agent loose on implementation and get decent results. Best results are still with guidance throughout, but I have never once regretted hammering out a very detailed planning document. I have many times regretted keeping code (or throwing code away).