Agreed here. A key theme, which isn’t terribly explicit in this post, is that your codebase is your context.

I’ve found that when my agent flies off the rails, it’s due to an underlying weakness in the construction of my program. The organization of the codebase doesn’t implicitly encode the “map”. Writing a prompt library helps to overcome this weakness, but I’ve found that the most enduring guidance comes from updating the codebase itself to be more discoverable.

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fragmede 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> my agent flies off the rails

Which, I've had it delete the entire project including .git out of "shame", so my claude doesn't get permission to run rm anymore.

Codex has fewer levers but it's deleted my entire project twice now.

(Play with fire, you're gonna get burnt.)

	▲	CPLX 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wait, what? Can you please describe this shame incident? Also, I have extremely frequent commits and version control syncs to GitHub and so on as part of the process (including when it's working on documents or things that aren't code) as a way to counteract this. Although I suppose a sufficiently devious AI can get around those, it seems to not have been a problem.