Let Your AI Coding Assistant Write Your Docs (Simple Prompt System)

Key Takeaways

here's an effective way you can use AI coding assistant to save time so you can get more work done or just finish your day earlier and chill first let me show off exactly what we're building and then we'll dig into this amazing AI coding assistant technique if you're writing code building products and interacting with llms I'm sure you've run into this problem where you created a prompt you got some great value out of it and then you proceeded to immediately lose track of it in your huge list of chat GPT prompts I've totally been there completely understand so I built a simple prompt system inside of the indid tools to solve this very problem it's Ultra easy to use let's open up the terminal and let's run IDT simple prompt system prompt Alias DP and then finally The Prompt function decorator and I'll explain exactly what this command is doing in just a second here just like that we have a output of function decorators in Python so how do you set up reusable prompts in a simple yet meaningful full effective way inside of the indb tools there's a configuration file SPS namespace there's this templates list and you can see here we have that PIQ item here so let's open that up and look at this this is a really simple prompt the Alias is PIQ which is exactly what you saw here- a PIQ so I'm specifying this python question prompt and you can see here we have the name the description we have empty variable lists but most importantly we have this prompt template right how do I we insert the prompt and then in Python right so this is just a quick prompt to ask how do I do something in Python right from the CLI so this is a really simple example let's run one more of these I have this vew C Alias which is going to generate an entire view component for me you can replace this with whatever your favorite frontend library is whatever tool you're working with you can create your own custom prompts here and this is where this really begins to become really effective right when you have a larger prompt a lot more context and you have some customized variables that you want to pass as well right so I can go ahead and just kick this off we can run something like indu tools simple prompt system- a and this is the UC Alias sanding for view component DP and then I'm going to say countdown timer and let's go ahead and pipe this to a file countdown. viw right so this is really helpful because we're not retyping this prompt every single time right we're also not opening up chat GPT we don't need a chat interface for this we don't need to go back and forth I just need an answer to my prompt and there we go so if we open up code countdown we can go ahead and see we have a brand new vue.js component if we clear out the comments that it's making here just like that we have a clean vue.js component that we can tweak that we can use and this is just one simple use case of how you can use the simple prompt system to build your own reusable prompts right if you like this idea if you like this tool hit the like hit the sub the link for this code base is going to be in the description to help you quickly set up your reusable prompts right from the command lines let's refocus on how we can use AI coding assistants to help us finish this tool in one critical aspect that aspect is documentation so the simple prompt system is part of the idev tools which is an opinionated agentic engineering toolbox to help Engineers solve problems using AI agents and if you scroll into the documentation here you can see we already have this multi-agent YouTube metadata generator and that's really cool so it has all of its documentation all wrapped up all finished but for the simp Le prompt system IDT SPS I haven't gotten to that yet and I need to write these docs so that it's clear and concise you know what exactly all this functionality does and how you know incoming users like yourself can come in and get set up with it really quickly right and so this is a really kind of common occurrence when you're engineering something right it's not just about the code it's about the documentation you're building around the code it's about communicating the value of what you're doing to other Engineers to your product managers Etc so one of the great things about AI coding assistants that I haven't seen talked about is they're not just for coding for sure they're built around engineering and they're obviously built to primarily right code but if we look at this simple prompt system we can actually use AI coding assistants to read out our dock strings to read out the variables to our functions and we can use it to even understand the underlying implementation if it needs to and then it can just generate the docs for us right so we can use AI coding assistance to get more value out of our codebase to write documents ation for us automatically so I'm going to go ahead and just open up the terminal again I'm going to CD into the app and now I'm going to boot up AER I'll also link AER in the description it is the best AI coding assistant right now tied only with cursor and I'm going to type add and let's go ahead and just add the file so I'm going to add the simple prompt system this is where our commands are listed you can see we just ran this prompt command you can see the- a flag there- P flag there I'm also going to add the read me I'm going to add one more file here I'm going to do the uh command SL youube and we want YouTube in here because the YouTube command is finished and it also has documentation already written right if you hop back over to the read me you can see here we can open up YouTube titles the YouTube titles command is written just like this and you can see right here in the documentation it's complete it looks good and it looks even cleaner on GitHub we can just click right to the YouTube titles command and what we want to do is essentially create this for the simp Le prompt system right I want to know exactly what commands I can use and I want to know exactly what arguments I need to specify and I want to know both the inputs and the outputs of running this command and you know the inputs and outputs follow that key principle that we've talked about on the channel focus on the inputs and the outputs to your methods and treat everything like a function to get simple clean results out of your llms but also the structure surrounding your llms inside your code base so we want to generate this documentation for the SPs system let's go ahead and do that right I'm not going to come in here I'm not going to copy paste I'm not going to start typing anything I'm going to open up AER and we're going to run this command generate documentation for the IDT SPS command build the readme docs for a new section and we want it underneath the tool guide under the tool guide section I've used this keyword to replicate results across different systems a lot of time when you're using AI co- Pilots inside your code you want to duplicate methods but tweak them just a little bit or you want to duplicate your documentation but change them just a little bit and so by using this keyword mirror we can get that result so we're going to say mirror the then we're just going to paste this section in and then I'm going to say for the simple prompt system and I'm going to let that run so let's see how our AI copil does generating documentation for us you can see there using the diff format it's jumping in starting to write the use case let's focus in on this so it's starting to write the use case it's writing that get started right it's got the PIP install Perfect it notices the SPs config that's great it picked up on that and awesome so now it's going into the SPs commands SPS help perfect SPS config there's the prompt command coming in nice and clean there's the list okay nice it even wrote the a mermaid diagram for us very cool um we'll see how accurate that is and now it's just listing some improvements interesting okay so let's see how that did it has the kind of top level header it has the use cases here perfect it's got the installation that's exactly right and then it has an example command nice and then we go into the individual command blocks perfect so we have the help we have the config we have the SPs prompt that's exactly how we ran this that looks great it's got the optional flag here here that's awesome it's got the list and then it has that G and then it created this diagram for us that's very interesting it's not exactly right but still you know kind of useful and then it also listed some improvements here for us nice not bad kind of blow up our multi-agent YouTube metadata generator content I just kind of like over Road and place these dots here that's totally fine when this happens what I like to do is copy everything that worked so I'm want to copy everything from the SPs mentation I'm just going to copy this to my clipboard I'm going to hit contrl Z to go back to the previous version right cuz AER is just saving this file it's making a commit to this file we now have the previous you know correct version I'm just going to collapse this and inside the stub of the simple prompt system I'm just going to paste over this right and that should correct everything and perfect so now we have both the multi-agent YouTube metadata generator section IDT YouTube and we have the simple prompt system IDT SPS so not perfect I'm sure there were things I could have done to this prompt to make it work in a single shot but it's almost more helpful though to see it make a mistake so I can share exactly how you can correct it a quick Copy contrl Z and paste the good stuff back in but this is one way you can use AI C Pilots you can use it to help you write documentation you can use it to help read out your code base generate useful information inside your readmes engineering isn't just about coding it's about the metadata and the information and the communication of the thing that you're building to other Engineers to users to you know to anyone that needs to interact with the thing you're building so so I wanted to hop on share this idea with you again feel free to check out the simple prompt system after I wrap up this video I'm going to go ahead come in here and add a bunch of my personal promp templates that I'm going to be reusing and just so it's clear you know writing great documentation is really about clear communication and it's Ultra important that you know whatever you're building whatever you're creating it's able to properly communicate The Core Concepts the core ideas to its users and so writing key documentation is really important if you're a senior level engineer even mid plus engineer you know that there's a big difference between Engineers that can you know communicate their ideas via writing via great documentation and those that can't so you know being able to write documentation is really important because most code is read many many many more times than it is written the read operation and the update operation on code and documentation happens way more than it gets created so it's really important to document how your tool Works how your code works it's a little hookup there but all in all it created every section we needed just by having the knowledge and the context of the added files inside of Aer we can type SL tokens and get the cost but we can also see all the files that we've added context is really everything when it comes to AI coding assistance and AA Tools in general they need to have the right information to help you solve your problem and by giving our AI assistant the read me the simple prompt system command line interface and a reference to the YouTube command line interface it was able to generate the documentation we needed here in a single prompt so that's you know maybe two three sentence long prompt versus writing all of this documentation here it's a huge timesaver definitely definitely spend some time playing around with a coding assistant ability to create documentation for you you're going to save a ton of time and it's going to help you get more done and finish up your engineering for the day I think a good rule of thumb in general is you want to use your coding assistant in your co-pilot to get 80% of the work done and started and then you take the 20% home I'll come through these docs right now make a few tweaks few updates for the most part this is basically done if you like these you know Hands-On boots on the ground AI coding assistant content definitely hit the like definitely hit the sub we've got a lot more ideas to touch on and we're pushing AI coding assistants as far as we possibly can so that we can become a gentic Engineers thanks so much for watching I'll see you in the next one