Comment by kierangill
2 days ago
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.
> 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.)
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.
Not OP, and haven't had it flat out rm the entire .git, but I have had Claude get flustered and pull a "Wait, no! what was I thinking? that idea doesn't work at all here, I need to revert that attempt and try something else..."
.. and then ran a fatally flawed "git checkout" command that wiped out all unstaged changes, which it immediately realized and after flailing around for five minutes trying to undo eventually came back saying "yeah uh so sorry, but... here's the thing..."
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