LLMs needs spells to work their magic

If you want to get good at LLM usage for coding, you may need to understand key terms in computer science/programming. Without out it, you kind of become a spellcaster without any spells which renders the LLM magic kind of useless.

I was doing some recreational programming with an LLM and I wanted to work on something that basically just "looked nice".

Let got me working on a "cool background visual" that had "elements of randomness" but also featured some light interactivity with the cursor. I started toying around and for the longest time I couldn't get anywhere. No matter how much I tried steering it in the right direction, it just wouldn't do the thing that I had in mind. Part of the issue was that my original prompt did not work well and that I spent too much time going deeper trying to fix the original response. It would have been better to have just started over. But the real issue was that I missed a key-term in the prompt.

If you're keen to see this play out, the following YouTube video has a log.

The missing term was "perlin noise" (link). The difference was night and day allmost to the extend that it felt with it kind of became like a spell. Knowing the right term really helps you guide the "LLM Magic" in the right direction.

Here is the final result, note how the mouse cursor interacts with the background.

Fun fact about the color palettes: these are based off the VSCode themes. I figured that those themes can really help with the nerdy easthetic that I was going for. In a way this is also a "spell". Just adding "VSCode themes" is a lot easier than actually trying to describe different color profiles.