As someone who is dyslexic, I was overjoyed when computers generally stopped giving a damn about my poor grammar. 1
It is therefore with mounting horror that I realise all the old grammar rules and sentence structures are now back as deeply technical skills, again thanks to AI.
To a certain extent, this has crept up on us. But when you write requests and requirements for any kind of code generation or rule-based agentic AI, you have to get the punctuation and structure right.
There are a lot of safety checks built into these systems. In fact, I’m surprised by just how many, all trying to stop human beings from doing something stupid. But they can’t protect against everything.
You can also quite easily correct a lot of mistakes by simply telling the AI to adjust or undo something, but that costs tokens, effort, computing power, time and all that kind of stuff.
What is becoming more and more apparent is that, as AI’s are increasingly tailored to be more human and to listen to instructions in a human way, having to talk like a formal human again is becoming an important technical skill.
And I suspect this is affecting the technical community rather more than they would like.
I’ve managed to escape some of this, having had to do so much more finance and management work in many of my current roles. But when I found myself being sloppy and not writing prompts as if I were talking to a manager, I discovered that the AI was making presumptions, doing odd things and costing me tonnes of tokens.
TLDR; When you’re coding with the help of AI, talking to it as if you’re talking to a manager is now the most efficient way of doing your job.
Yes, you can give detailed technical requirements, but they have to be in cohesive, well-structured sentences.
Sorry.
- Although command line tools are still a bit grumpy over the bad spelling bit.[↩]