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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure I’m just working like a caveman, but I simply highlight the relevant code, add it to the chat, and talk to these tools as if they were my colleagues and I’m getting pretty good results.

About 12 to 6 months ago this was not the case (with or without .md files), I was getting mainly subpar result, so I’m assuming that the models have improved a lot.

Basically, I found that they not make that much of a difference, the model is either good enough or not…

I know (or at least I suppose) that these markdown files could bring some marginal improvements, but at this point, I don’t really care.

I assume this is an unpopular take because I see so many people treat these files as if they were black magic or silver bullet that 100x their already 1000x productivity.

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> I simply highlight the relevant code, add it to the chat, and talk to these tools

Different use case. I assume the discussion is about having the agent implement whole features or research and fix bugs without much guidance.

Yep it is opinionated for how to get coding agents to solve hard problems in complex brownfield codebases which is what we are focused on at humanlayer :)

Matches my experience also. Bothered only once to setup a proper CLAUDE.md file, and now never do it. Simply refering to the context properly for surgical recommendations and edit works relatively well.

It feels a lot like bikeshedding to me, maybe I’m wrong

How about a list of existing database tables/columns so you don't need to repeat it each time?

Claude code figures that out at startup every time. Never had issues with it.

You can save some precious context by having it somewhere without it having to figure it out from scratch every time.

Do you not use a model file for your orm?

ORMs are generally a bad idea, so.. hopefully not?

Even without the explicit magic ORMs, with data mapper style query builders like Kysely and similar, I still find I need to marshall selected rows into objects to, yknow, do things with them in a lot of cases.

Perhaps a function of GraphQL though.

Sure, but that's not the same thing. For example, whether or not you have to redeclare your entire database schema in a custom ORM language in a different repo.

This isn't the 00s any more.

I gave it a tool to execute to get that info if required, but it mostly doesn’t need to due to Kysely migration files and the database type definition being enough.

=== myExperience

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