Show HN: Using classic dev books to guide AI agents | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Using classic dev books to guide AI agents

3 pointsZLStas2 comments

I've been experimenting with turning principles from classic software engineering books (Clean Code, DDIA, etc.) into structured "skill" files that AI agents can use during code review. Each skill is an opinionated instruction set grounded in known engineering wisdom — not a summary or excerpt. Repo: https://github.com/ZLStas/skills I'm trying to figure out the best way to wire this into a practical workflow — whether as a review layer or as a tool to iteratively refactor a legacy codebase into something clean and well-structured. A few open questions I'd love input on:

Does it make sense to use book-based principles as a structured lens for AI-driven code review? How would you set up sub-agents to iteratively review LLM output — one agent creates, another evaluates — without the review becoming shallow or repetitive? Has anyone tried a different approach that worked better? How do you maintain project context across multiple review passes so the agent doesn't lose sight of the bigger picture?

The answer, my friendow, is blowing in the context window [1]…

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…LLMs already "know" these books deeply, but without a structured prompt scaffold they apply that knowledge inconsistently and at low confidence. Giving the model a explicit lens — "review this as if you're checking against Clean Code heuristics C1–C36" — concentrates attention and dramatically reduces hallucinated or off-topic feedback…

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Where I'd push back or warn you:

Context collapse is your #1 enemy. Clean Code was written for Java in 2008. DDIA is about distributed systems at scale. If you apply the Clean Code reviewer to a 50-line Python script, you'll get pedantic nonsense about function length when the actual problem might be that the data model is wrong. Your skill selection logic needs to be domain-aware, not just "throw all skills at every file"…

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[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/ZLStasQ1

Cool idea — “book as rubric” is a nice way to avoid vague self-critiques.

One thing I’ve found helps keep agent review loops from getting shallow is to separate levels of critique: 1) a fast “lint” pass (format, obvious bugs, missing tests) 2) a domain pass that’s forced to cite specific passages/rules from the rubric 3) a “counterexample” pass: reviewer must propose at least 1 concrete failing scenario + how to reproduce

Question: are you capturing the reviewer’s evidence (links, excerpts, failing cases) in a structured log so a human can audit why the agent changed something?

Related: I’m working on SkillForge (https://skillforge.expert) — we’ve been thinking about similar auditability, but for UI workflows: record once, then replay with checkpoints + retries, so humans approve at meaningful boundaries instead of every click.

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