Are you at least conversational in the subject matter? You're gonna have a good time just by paying attention and adjusting your workflow. If you're getting a lot of back and forth with it, its asking a lot of planning type questions, stop, step back, rethink the whole feature, and start again from the beginning with everything more fleshed out.
If you are in a brand new field, there's no way to bridge that divide. The issue is you don't know what is good or bad, or whether what you have learned is good or bad. You're in a sports car and you don't know how to drive much less what's track and what's field.
You can spend a lot of effort getting good at prompting towards writing tests and E2E tests to at least verify your app does what you expect it to, regardless of experience.
This is a great point and I agree. My own productivity varies based on what part of the codebase I'm working on. If it's "been in there before" and I know the right questions to ask, I can one-shot a good design/improvement. If I'm spending 20-30 minutes asking Fable to "draw a diagram so I can understand" - probably less so. But notably, I CAN get there in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. You can general personalized onboarding docs to ~anything.
Keep the decision-making and execution separate. Use the high IQ models to chat about the design and make them drive subagents to do the actual work. "Chat" style threads are actually quite cheap. Where it gets expensive is having Fable 5 output thousands of lines of implementation where 95% of it was already overdetermined and there were only a few important judgement calls.
I actually have no doubt that I could replace my Opus 5 Low/Medium subagent profiles with Grok 4.5/GLM 5.2/Deepseek v4 Flash and perf would probably be pretty similar.
On top of that - highly recommend adding accurate cost counters to your statusline. You can't improve what you don't measure! (Or even have any intuition about).
in my humble experience it boils down to mastery.
Are you at least conversational in the subject matter? You're gonna have a good time just by paying attention and adjusting your workflow. If you're getting a lot of back and forth with it, its asking a lot of planning type questions, stop, step back, rethink the whole feature, and start again from the beginning with everything more fleshed out.
If you are in a brand new field, there's no way to bridge that divide. The issue is you don't know what is good or bad, or whether what you have learned is good or bad. You're in a sports car and you don't know how to drive much less what's track and what's field.
You can spend a lot of effort getting good at prompting towards writing tests and E2E tests to at least verify your app does what you expect it to, regardless of experience.
This is a great point and I agree. My own productivity varies based on what part of the codebase I'm working on. If it's "been in there before" and I know the right questions to ask, I can one-shot a good design/improvement. If I'm spending 20-30 minutes asking Fable to "draw a diagram so I can understand" - probably less so. But notably, I CAN get there in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. You can general personalized onboarding docs to ~anything.
I appreciate this non-judgmental description of what it's like to approach a topic/technology from a newcomer's perspective. Thanks!
Keep the decision-making and execution separate. Use the high IQ models to chat about the design and make them drive subagents to do the actual work. "Chat" style threads are actually quite cheap. Where it gets expensive is having Fable 5 output thousands of lines of implementation where 95% of it was already overdetermined and there were only a few important judgement calls.
I actually have no doubt that I could replace my Opus 5 Low/Medium subagent profiles with Grok 4.5/GLM 5.2/Deepseek v4 Flash and perf would probably be pretty similar.
On top of that - highly recommend adding accurate cost counters to your statusline. You can't improve what you don't measure! (Or even have any intuition about).
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