Top-down vs Bottoms-up

There's two different ways of thinking about code. There's a top down way and a bottoms up way. Top down is like the goals what you're trying to accomplish and bottoms up is what's possible in the computer. And when you're prompting, you're doing a top down thing. You're like telling the computer what you want it to do. And then it's having to figure out the bottoms up stuff. And you need both. And I think it's a big mistake. I think a big part of the confusion is people think we can only do the top down part and forget about the bottoms up. But what's amazing about bottoms up stuff if you've ever done any creative endeavor like programming like writing is that thebottom which all of you haveobviously is that the details the bottoms up stuff surprises you. You have a goal. You have an idea of how to accomplish it and then as you get going you get closer to the bottom and oh wow that wasn't possible or there's like extra complexity there and then it changes your goals. And if you let it, it will obviously change who you are as a person. And I think that's part of what makes a person technical. When you let the interplay between your high level goals and the bottoms up details interact.

"Stop learning to code"

How are we so confused?

DHH's 10:59 AM May 9, 2025 post on X:

I'm using LLMs all day long, but I'm not letting it write my code. It's looking up APIs. It's explaining concepts, but I want to reserve the fun part of programming for myself: Actually writing code!

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Val Town's Townie AI Prompt

When trying to understand the directory, first read the README.md. Whenever you make a change to the code, be sure to keep the README.md up to date unless the user asks you not to.