Honestly just go for it, it’s pretty straightforward! I’d share my chat transcript but it at points contained things like my API keys.
I can however give some excerpts from the conversation:
You are a senior software engineer. Create a python script that logs into a website using the selenium/standalone-chrome docker container
This was actually my first time using the “You are a senior software engineer” bit, but I’ve heard a few people saying it works. I came across the idea for using Selenium from this prompt:
Please write a python script to load a website, login, navigate to a URL, and then scrape all of the text that matches a CSS selector
In fact here is the chat transcript for that one. Once I got to the end of this transcript I decided to try out the code. I realized selenium was using my installed browser and that wasn’t going to work once I moved this to a server. That was when I moved into a new chat that contains what became the final script, where I started the conversation with this prompt:
I need to write a script that submits a form on a webpage. This script needs to be run from a VPS that does not have a browser
It was in this conversation that I learned about using the headless chrome container. Everything I did was a combination of prompting for additions and reading the documentation on what that was capable of.
I will regularly ditch a chat thread and take the output from a previous one into a new one, as it takes the previous context of the conversation into account for informing future generation, and sometimes I want to pivot or I want to focus in on a specific approach.
Once I had a more focused idea of what the tech stack was going to be it was just a matter of prompt what I needed, test, feed it back any errors and get corrections, notice something wrong (like it wasn’t appending .mp3) to the files, or something else I wanted to change, and prompt it in plain english.
There’s all kinds of people saying you should use X method and Y approach, but I find I get great results by just being clear and concise with what I’m looking for, as I would when speaking to another developer.