One of the best ways to become a more effective user of LLMs is to watch other people use them. An eye-opener for me was this post   by Nicholas Carlini.

Some useful snippets from Simon Willison’s LLM usage guide:

The best way to start any project is with a prototype that proves that the key requirements of that project can be met. I often find that an LLM can get me to that working prototype within a few minutes of me sitting down with my laptop—or sometimes even while working on my phone.

I could write this function myself, but it would take me the better part of fifteen minutes to look up all of the details and get the code working right. Claude knocked it out in 15 seconds.I find LLMs respond extremely well to function signatures like the one I use here. I get to act as the function designer, the LLM does the work of building the body to my specification.

I often wonder if this is one of the key tricks that people are missing—a bad initial result isn’t a failure, it’s a starting point for pushing the model in the direction of the thing you actually want.

I’ve been vibe-coding since before Andrej gave it a name! My simonw/tools GitHub repository has 77 HTML+JavaScript apps and 6 Python apps, and every single one of them was built by prompting LLMs. I have learned so much from building this collection, and I add to it at a rate of several new prototypes per week.

And this is similar to something I wrote before:

I’m certain it would have taken me significantly longer without LLM assistance—to the point that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to build it at all. This is why I care so much about the productivity boost I get from LLMs so much: it’s not about getting work done faster, it’s about being able to ship projects that I wouldn’t have been able to justify spending time on at all.