A loose prompt wasted all his tokens rebuilding a tool that already exists

Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

He mis-prompts the agent on a toy project
It wastes all his tokens building a specialized clone of an existing tool instead of building on it

Why it’s worth knowing

He owns the mis-prompt in the telling, which makes it useful.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be

2The prompt, with the steps

3The check when it’s done

Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.