On another note, I find AI instructions like this (e.g. "Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything",...") more harm than good in my own uses. It changes behavior in subtle ways that makes it less predictable to me. I'd rather it has its own AI-isms and quirks, that I've fully gotten used to, and I know what to expect. I know when it says certain things, in certain ways, that's what I think it means. Quirks and AI-isms don't annoy me, I get used to how it states things.
> "now I have the full picture"
I always interpreted that phrase as a sort of marker to delimit the phase in which it explores the codebase and gathers information from the phase in which it implements the changes.
Not sure if it's still done, but I think some months ago there was discussion that some of the phrases are injected by the inference loop to "steer" the model - e.g. "But wait" if a thought block was too short etc. Obviously such phrases couldn't be influenced by the prompt.
Anyway: in my case Opus absolutely did not follow a similar instruction in the CLAUDE.md file. (But then again: it hardly followed _any_ CLAUDE.md instruction properly)
And if you manage to do this automatically before committing, you’ve built the backpressure everybody is talking about.
And probably that should be run in different harness or with custom system prompt? Since they introduce quirks and glitches as well.
(somehow this motivated me to resurrect HN account)
I often tell codex to launch a subagent without prior context to „remove BS phrases and make the prose sound more natural and higher readability“. That‘s usually enough to get better results.
No, it’s good. When they stop doing this, it’ll be harder spot the machine slop.