When I find myself in a situation where I’ve been hammering an LLM and it keeps veering down unproductive paths - trying poor solutions or applying fixes that make no difference but eventually we do arrive at the correct answer, the result is often a massive 100+ KB running context.

To help mitigate this in the future I'll often prompt:

  “Why did it take so long to arrive at the solution? What did you do wrong?”

Then I follow up with:

  “In a single paragraph, describe the category of problem and a recommended approach for diagnosing and solving it in the future.”

I then add this summary to either the relevant MD file (CHANGING_CSS_LAYOUTS.md, DATA_PERSISTENCE.md, etc) or more generally to the DISCOVERIES.md file, which is linked from my CLAUDE.md under:

  - When resolving challenging directives, refresh yourself with: docs/DISCOVERIES.md - it contains useful lessons learned and discoveries made during development.

I don't think linking to an entire commit full of errors/failures is necessarily a good idea - feels like it would quickly lead to the proverbial poisoning of the well.