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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that the prompt is the most important thing, I'd say other things like the model you use, a clean codebase, actually reading code and using discretion about which changes are accepted are far more important if you're using AI for work that needs to be correct. LLMs still make significant mistakes in design especially.

Harness, prompt etc etc are all peripheral IMO, though people like to think their super long prompt, custom harness and MakeNoMistakes.md skills are what contributes to their special skill with AIs, but really models are just improving.

You can just trust the AI to generate a perfect answer I suppose (and why are humans slowing it down at all if so?), but if you don't expect that yet you have to put in the work.

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I think I noticed claude uses the shape and style of the existing code base to generate the new code. When reviewing claude's output, it looks familiar and the patterns are similar to what I would write.

I'm not sure who is studying this yet, but there has to be a statistical relationship between three factors of

1. intelligence of the human: the design patterns and architecture is already modelled in the mind, steering the AI becomes easy to know what to say next

2. quality of the codebase: the LLM can pick up the adjacent patterns and write code that looks and works cleanly.

3. quality of the prompt: the prompt keeps the AI focused and ignores the trivial side effects; keep the AI wandering away from critical path work; sometimes the AI can't make the decision what call site is next

In summation, what if claude is just a mirror pointing back at us? It certainly would explain wildly divergent opinions of opus 5.5

There are definitely nuances, and yes of course the prompt must make some difference, but I'm not convinced it makes as big a difference as some think, particularly a long prompt or complex setup of harnesses etc surrounding the LLM model.

To me the order of importance would be:

1. The model - if you use a terrible model you'll get bad output

2. The codebase - this definitely forms the model for what claude outputs to some extent.

3. The human operator, what they accept and reject etc.

4. Things like prompts, skills, harnesses etc. The quality of the prompt.

So I think our positions are really just a different ordering of what is important rather than fundamentally opposed.

Re Claude being a mirror, if it is it's a particularly distorting mirror which often changes things in subtle ways and is determined to make people feel smart and addicted to its output - it has been trained to do so after all. I really don't think a mirror is the best analogy, because it's too independent and seductive to be a mirror.

There's a good example of the sort of thing they produce without good guidance as a dead comment on this thread as a reply to yours. Encouraging, positive and superficially plausible, but without any actual meaning or intention. The equivalent of that in code is what we need to be wary of.

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