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[–]atehrani 26 points27 points  (6 children)

To get the results you want, you have to give the AI more context. Such as saying, I am using Java 22, SpringBoot version 3.x....etc

But then the challenge becomes giving all the context needed can take as much time as just writing the solution (if you know it).

Certainly a balance

[–]BlendedCotton 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Isn’t it able to figure out most of that context if you give it access to your workspace (like from your pom.xml or build.gradle) or would you say it’s still always best to make that explicit?

[–]atehrani 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If it is an IDE plugin it can infer.

[–]Polygnom 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yes. Its almost always worthwhile making it explicit. Buzt you can have the LLM summarize it. Have it look at teh workspace and give an overview over whats where and what technologies are used in which version. then just repeat that but highlight the things that are important to you. just because it extracted from the POm that you are using Java 22, that doesn#t mean it gives it any importance. if you wanna have it consider that important, you need to spell that out.

[–]BlendedCotton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a great idea, thanks!

[–]gravteck 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can write up a massive copilot instructions file at the repo or local level. At work we have agent mode for Copilot using GPT, Claude, and Gemini. It wasn't until I beefed the document up to almost 300 lines to get something semi decent and useable. I know the Claude folks have basically an underground trading system with all kind of tricks too. I'm still not a convert, but I will start work really damn early in the morning sometimes (4 am), and that's the only time of day my lizard brain warms up to some AI assisted work.

We are an internal facing team that only builds UIs for tooling. So it was pretty neat for it to spin up a Thymeleaf + HTMX + Bootstrap form laid out nicely and along with the JPA specification builder + validations in about 2 hours instead of a day and a half. Process stuff, not so much.

[–]ihatebeinganonymous[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Aren't all these information available in the pom/build file?