AI fills in the blank

The article "Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature" by Mitchell Hashimoto was shared on my work slack, and there was a particular phrase he uses a couple of times that resonates with me:

AI is very good at fill-in-the-blank or draw-the-rest-of-the-owl. My pattern here of creating scaffolding with descriptive function names, parameters, todo comments, etc. is a really common one for me and it works very well.

"I broke a bunch of things, please fix my mess." is another frequent use case I have for agents. I'd say generally this fits within the same fill-in-the-blank pattern as before.

This concept of "AI fills in the blank" lines up with my experience as well. AI enables me to run the fastest on work where I create a clear outline–one that I almost know ahead of time what belongs inside the lines–and tell AI to fill in the rest. It makes perfect sense that LLMs are so good at this, they are based on predicting what comes next.