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Comment by ankarhem | Hacker News Reader

Haven't really experienced it besides in long contexts. Usually keep it concise. Something like:

  We're building feature X.
  - You might need `a`, `b`, `c`. (any libraries, url documentation etc)
  - The requirements are:
    - x
    - y
    - z

Any negatives (prevent going down a path) would go into requirement.

This would be a prompt to sisyphus if small or prometheus if big. (Using opencode + oh-my-openagent).

If I believe the agent won't understand what it is supposed to do or if there are multiple solutions of which only some are allowed I add "DO NOT make or edit any business rules before asking me".

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> We're building feature X. - You might need `a`, `b`, `c`. (any libraries, url documentation etc) - The requirements are: - x - y - z

So, you are saying we have to start every conversation for an existing project with this context? pointing to the particular feature detail we are targeting?

No this would be something targeted such as:

  We have a bug in our handler for the distributed transaction which updates the payment amount. It allows modifications when it should not.

  The requirements are:
    - We should reject regular changes outside of intent state
    - We should allow upsell when state is accepted and upsell modifications is activate in the config
    - You do NOT have to consider shipping during upsell, it is out of scope and is already required not to change as a result of upsell elsewhere.

We don't use any CLAUDE.md files or similar. Skills for things that it gets wrong and the rest it can handle by reading the repos themselves.

Underlying plugin prompts makes sure it completes the task and adds tests etc.

Now it is convincing. But the same approach a week ago frustrated me. The problem was some guy in office wrote the logs, and it was somehow logging success even though it was going in the catch block due to an error. But the claude was convinced that the logs were right and even though i was telling it not to trust the logs and listing the exact thing to fix, it did the opposite and in the end i had to do it manually along with fixing the logger. Nevermind, your approach is reliable and will surely work when the logs are fine. Thanks

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