PSA: my buddy who codes told me to stop asking AI to 'explain' things and start asking it to 'critique' my thinking instead

He said when I ask Claude to explain a concept it just gives me a textbook paragraph, but when I wrote out my own messy theory and said 'rip this apart', I got way deeper insights than I ever expected, has anyone else tried flipping the prompt like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

felix_thomas734d ago

My buddy does the same thing with his GPS, argues with it until he figures out where he really went wrong.

ivan2114d ago

I saw a dev on Twitter say the same thing last week - he called it "prompting for pushback" and claimed it fixed half his bugs overnight because it made him explain his own logic first. The difference is you're forcing the AI to engage with your specific mess instead of just giving a generic definition. Works way better for debugging too since you already have context, you just need someone to point out what you missed.