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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had good results using Claude Code by specifically coaching it on how its implementation should be. It’s not always perfect and sometimes I do have to try again, but it’s remarkably effective when given enough guidance.

If only I could figure out how to reliably keep it from adding useless comments or preserving obsolete interfaces for “backward compatibility”…

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Me too, I’m using Roo Code and have substantially updated the system prompt to describe the project standards, correct way to restart the services and inspect the logs, specific hints about the frameworks im using and how to use DI and patterns, like think about what kind of code it’s writing and where to put it in the project structure, admonitions not to do certain things it would otherwise do (like in Python it’s common for it to generate code to import inside of functions which can cause runtime errors). I’m experimenting with a tree sitter MCP to see if I can make it aware of the structure of the entire project in a more compact way without all of the code in the context window, we will see where that goes.

Anyways, a year or two ago, the state of the art models couldn’t do math, and the image models couldn’t render hands or text, and those problems are broadly fixed, and I pretty much expect vibe coding to dramatically improve in the next year or two.

I haven't used Claude Code, but I have used Windsurf, Cursor, and Continue. They all do well with their own "rules" files. I essentially understand that as something similar to a System prompt sent before a chat session. I even have pretty specific rules on styling that are unique to me, and it generally follows those.

It's also worth asking what rule it would need in order to follow the rule. On occasion, a rule I've added isn't quite followed. So I'll respond immediately pointing out what it did, that the rule is in the file, and then will ask it to tell me how I should modify, or add to, the rule in order for it to be easier to follow.

I'd imagine Claude Code has something similar that might be worth looking into.

Another thing Claude loves is fixing type errors by vomiting up conditionals 10 levels deep that check for presence, and type, and time of day, and age of the universe before it fixes the actual type issue..

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