Comment by radarsat1
9 hours ago
I've thought about saving my prompts along with project development and even done it by hand a few times, but eventually I realized I don't really get much value from doing so. Are there good reasons to do it?
9 hours ago
I've thought about saving my prompts along with project development and even done it by hand a few times, but eventually I realized I don't really get much value from doing so. Are there good reasons to do it?
Using them for evals at a future date.
I save all of mine, including their environment, and plan to use them for iterating on my various system prompts and tool instructions.
For me it's increasingly the work. I spend more time in Claude Code going back and forth with the agent than I do in my text editor hacking on the code by hand. Those transcripts ARE the work I've been doing. I want to save them in the same way that I archive my notes and issues and other ephemera around my projects.
My latest attempt at this is https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts which produces output like the is: https://gisthost.github.io/?c75bf4d827ea4ee3c325625d24c6cd86...
Right, I get that writing prompts is "the work", but if you run them again you don't get the same code. So what's the point of keeping them? They are not 'source code' in the same sense as a programming language.
That's why I want the transcript that shows the prompts AND the responses. The prompts alone have little value. The overall conversation shows me exactly what I did, what the agent did and the end result.
1 reply →
If the AI generated most of the code based on these prompts, it's definitely valuable to review the prompts before even looking at the code. Especially in the case where contributions come from a wide range of devs at different experience levels.
At a minimum it will help you to be skeptical at specific parts of the diff so you can look at those more closely in your review. But it can inform test scenarios etc.
It's not for you. It's so others can see how you arrived to the code that was generated. They can learn better prompting for themselves from it, and also how you think. They can see which cases got considered, or not. All sorts of good stuff that would be helpful for reviewing giant PRs.
Sounds depressing. First you deal with massive PRs and now also these agent prompts. Soon enough there won't be any coding at all, it seems. Just doomscrolling through massive prompt files and diffs in hopes of understanding what is going on.
I suspect this future will not play out. Mitchell is definitely leaning to one side on this debate.
To me, quality code is quality code no matter how it was arrived at. That should be the end of it