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Comment by tkiolp4

3 days ago

> I can't be the only one to think it is silly to interact with tools in this way. Honestly, I see skills, "hooks", and other monkey-patch efforts as things that will be short-lived investments, weird kludges from an era where you had to "hand-crank" your AI, more often. Something to go the same way as using HTML tables as bastardized CSS

Agree. It’s sad to see our field plagued by this monkey patch efforts. I reviewed the other day a skill MD file that stated “Don’t introduce bugs, please”. Like, wtf is that? Before LLMs we weren’t taken seriously as an engineering discipline, and I didn’t agree. But nowadays, I feel ashamed of every skill MD file that pollutes the repos I maintain. Junior engineers or fresh graduates that are told to master some AI/LLM tool (I think the nvidia ceo said that) are going to have absolute zero knowledge of how systems work and are going to rely on prompts/skills. How come thats not something to be worried about?

Have you measured whether “no bugs, make no mistakes” improves results? Or is the very thought of it too absurd to you to evaluate?

  • I haven't tried it myself, but, I would assume that this sort of instruction in CLAUDE.md would indeed make it a bit more careful, to the detriment of its development velocity, which for my use-case would be bad. I generally prefer for it to experiment in many directions rapidly, and only once we have an approach that solves the problem well, to do extensive testing.

  • When I was younger I was sold in the idea of data driven decisions. Everything needs to be measured, otherwise you are just biased, and bias is bad. Nowadays I do still rely on data and measurements but I also have experience and taste to judge things. Answering your question, the latter.