Building a Collection of Coding Prompts

Quick intro

Here’s an idea that ocurred to me almost a month ago, and something that I have been working on since then. As I have written in an earlier post, I started using AI for programming and haven’t stopped doing that yet. Which means, I am chatting with a tool in English, and the tool is doing everything that constitutes programming

Writing some code
Fixing errors
Improving the code
Understanding code - this is very useful for things which I don’t always have in my short-term memory (think CSS, JavaScript framework quirks etc)
Trying out new approaches
Debugging deployment and production issues

The list above is real - I have actually done all of them and more.

The importance of coding prompts

These chat messages with your AI coding tool of choice (mine is Windsurf) are all prompts. Let’s call them coding prompts. I noticed that many powerful coding prompts are not that long. In fact, I am frequently delighted by a single sentence generating almost all the code for a small project, or one step of a larger project. I think it will be important to have a collection of coding prompts which are useful. And it will be equally important to know coding prompts which don’t work. Unlike programming languages which have a defined syntax and semantics, prompts don’t have 100% predictable behaviour. As neural networks keep evolving we’ll discover what works 90% of the time through trial and error.

The idea

So I thought we ought to have a community-driven website where coding prompts can be searched, added and up- or down-voted. Thanks to the people at EveryDAI, I got the support and encouragement I needed to try this idea out. And I started building CodePromptFu.com.

What next

This is just the beginning. I really don’t know whether this idea will live long enough. I have started engaging with the AI coding community to see what people need. I feel the best version of the future would be one where most of us software engineers became prompt engineers. So that prompts become the way to interact with machines. This would drastically reduce the need for inventing new programming languages and frameworks. I guess we’ll know in the next decade.