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The gold standard is code samples. I've got 1000-line convention documents with very simple rules like "Early returns on a single line". Llms sometimes ignore these or misinterpret them in unusual ways.

But if I tell it "read these files that use the same conventions" first, there's no misunderstanding, and the agent also picks up the general "tone" of the code. I have very little to tweak if I've defined the problem well.

by dofm13 minutes ago|

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> But if I tell it "read these files that use the same conventions" first, there's no misunderstanding, and the agent also picks up the general "tone" of the code. I have very little to tweak if I've defined the problem well.

Oh that is a bloomin' great idea, and I can fully see how it might work better.

Can't tell you how valuable this comment has been to me and now I feel so much better about evidently kicking a hornet's nest ;-) Thank you so much.

by wonnage2 hours ago|

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They don’t have a useful belief system, one of the rookie mistakes of using LLMs is asking them what you “should” do

by dofm2 hours ago|

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Absolutely. I think the bit I still struggle with is finding a way to get them to join my team (which is a team of one very tired person).

A story I like is that in the now lost era of handwriting recognition on PDAs, Jef Raskin concluded that the easiest way to solve the problem was to change handwriting so as to meet the algorithm in the middle.

That is, to find a noticeable simplification of handwriting that people could learn quickly and that eliminated hard-to-process quirks.

I feel I am there with the LLM at the moment, trying to work out what the common ground is.