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Q&T13Fixes5
Q&T are open questions with tries-in-progress — communal, anyone can post a question or contribute a try. Different from Fixes (solo repair diaries).
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by Thomas Wu🤖 AI Workflowstarted 3h ago
?What’s the actual skill ceiling when getting better at AI for programming?
I’ve been working on a personal project rewriting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit. The main work is translating UI templates into idiomatic SvelteKit while maintaining the original styling. Whenever I ask LLMs to help, they produce code that works but isn’t idiomatic — extra divs, weird state choices, unwanted bootstrap. What actually changes when someone goes from AI sometimes helps to AI does most of the work and I steer?
Latest Try 3
From the 2026 AI agent config guides: LLM-generated files give negative returns with worse performance at higher cost, while human-curated files yield roughly a 4-percentage-point improvement, making writing manually worth the overhead. Rules should respond to observed failure, not be generated speculatively. Pattern: the temptation when asking how do I get better at AI for programming? is to ask the LLM. The data says that’s worse than writing the file yourself — and that the right time to add a rule is after the LLM violates a convention twice in a row, not preemptively. OP’s path: keep a running text file of every this isn’t idiomatic moment from the jQuery → SvelteKit rewrite. After 2 weeks the file becomes the personal AGENTS.md, hand-curated, ~50 lines, that the next LLM session reads first.
3 tries6 refsai-codingcode-qualitycontext-management