Comment by moduspol
6 hours ago
To me, such techniques feel like temporary cudgels that may or may not even help that will be obsolete in 1-6 months.
This is similar to telling Claude Code to write its steps into a separate markdown file, or use separate agents to independently perform many tasks, or some of the other things that were commonly posted about 3-6+ months ago. Now Claude Code does that on its own if necessary, so it's probably a net negative to instruct it separately.
Some prompting techniques seem ageless (e.g. giving it a way to validate its output), but a lot of these feel like temporary scaffolding that I don't see a lot of value in building a workflow around.
Totally agree - the fundamental concept here of automatically improving context control when writing code is absolutely something that will be baked into agents in 6 months. The reason it hasn't yet is mainly because the improvements it makes seem to be very marginal.
You can contrast this to something like reasoning, which offered very large, very clear improvements in fundamental performance, and as a result was tackled very aggressively by all the labs. Or (like you mentioned) todo lists, which gave relatively small gains but were implemented relatively quickly. Automatic context control is just going to take more time to get it right, and the gains will be quite small.
Workflow matters too, how you organize your docs, work tasks, reviews. If you do it all by hand you spend a lot of time manually enforcing a process that can be automated.
I think task files with checkable gates are a very interesting animal - they carry intent, plan, work and reviews, at the end of work can become docs. Can be executed, but also passed as value, and reflect on themselves - so they sport homoiconicity and reflexion.