This is something that continues to surprise me. LLMs are extremely flexible and already come prepackaged with a lot of "knowledge", you don't need to dump hundreds of lines of text to explain to it what good software development practices are. I suspect these frameworks/patterns just fill up the context with unecessary junk.

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raesene9 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think avoiding filling context up with too much pattern information, is partially where agent skills are coming from, with the idea there being that each skill has a set of triggers, and the main body of the skill is only loaded into context, if that trigger is hit.

You could still overload with too many skills but it helps at least.

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vidarh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You get to 80% there (numbers pulled out of the air) by just telling it to do things. You do need more to get from 80% there to 90%+ there.

How much more depends on what you're trying to do and in what language (e.g. "favourite" pet peeve: Claude occasionally likes to use instance_variable_get() in Ruby instead of adding accessors; it's a massive code smell), but there are some generic things, such as giving it instructions on keeping notes and giving them subagents to farm out repetitive tasks to prevent the individual task completion from filling up the context for tasks that are truly independent (in which case, for Claude Code at least, you can also tell it to do multiple in parallel)

But, indeed, just starting Claude Code (or Codex; I prefer Claude but it's a "personality thing" - try tools until you click with one) and telling it to do something is the most important step up from a chat window.

	▲	cobolexpert an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I agree about the small tweaks like the Ruby accessor thing, I also have some small notes like that myself, to nudge the agent in the right direction.

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Macha an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I don't instruct it to in some way, the agent will not write tests, will not conform with the linter standard, will not correctly figure out the command to run a subset of tests, etc.

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epolanski an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> I suspect these frameworks/patterns just fill up the context with unecessary junk.

That's exactly the point. Agents have their own context.

Thus, you try to leverage them by combining ad-hoc instructions for repetitive tasks (such as reviewing code or running a test checklist) and not polluting your conversation/context.

	▲	cobolexpert an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ah do you mean sub-agents? I do understand that if I summon a sub-agent and give it e.g. code reviewing instructions, it will not fill up the context of the main conversation. But my point is that giving the sub-agent the instruction "review this code as if you were a staff engineer" (literally those words) should cover most use cases (but I can't prove this, unfortunately).