Comment by intended

3 days ago

This isnt science, or engineering.

This is voodoo.

It likely works - but knowing that YAGNI is a thing, means at some level you are invoking a cultural touchstone for a very specific group of humans.

Edit -

I dug into the superpowers and skills for a bit. Definitely learned from it.

There’s stuff that doesn’t make sense to me on a conceptual basis. For example in the skill to preserve productive tensions. There’s a part that goes :

> The trade-off is real and won't disappear with clever engineering

There’s no dimension for “valid” or prediction for tradeoff.

I can guess that if the preceding context already outlines tradeoffs clearly, or somehow encodes that there is no clever solution that threads the needle - then this section can work.

Just imagining what dimensions must be encoding some of this suggests that it’s … it won’t work for situations where the example wasn’t already encoded in the training. (Not sure how to phrase it)

> This isnt science, or engineering. > This is voodoo.

I was struggling to find the exact reason this type of article bugs me so much, and I think "voodoo" is precisely the correct phrase to sum up my feelings.

I don't mean that as a judgement on the utility of LLMs or that reading about what different users have tried out to increase that utility isn't valuable. But if someone asked me how to most effectively get started with coding agents, my instinct is to answer (a) carefully and (b) probably every approach works somewhat.