Lack of design vocabulary and prompting skills for effective communication in application development

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 2 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “> I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. One thing you can do is, once you finally do get the model to do what you want, ask it how it would have described the change itself, in a way that would have skipped the intermediate steps. In my experience, this lets me more quickly explain what I want in the future.”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days. The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too ("I can tell you're trying to build XYZ for ABC purpose, considering the totality of the context and goals, the most efficient and effective way to go about this is..."). The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you&”

  Hacker News · frustration