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Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

I work in Unity and I got frustrated with Claude constantly doing gross bash/grep/awk/sed/grep nested loops that took forever that I finally described (and had Claude implement and install) a tool that could, in a single pass, gather all this info from a Unity forest of scenes at once and answer all the questions Claude ever wanted to ask about a Unity project in a single pass that takes 50ms instead of 10 30 second iterations. It still took a lot of coaching to get it to actually use this tool, but it seems like I’ve convinced it.

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Haha yep I’m experimenting with Unreal engine and Codex and it spent 10 minutes while I was AFK confidently trying to build a scene. I load it up and fall through the world. I say “can’t you write a tool to screenshot so you know you’ve done a reasonable job correctly?” and now it does that.

It reminds me of working with a junior dev and he was pushing his code to dev, then waiting for it to build for every update because he couldn’t get it to build locally. 5 minutes of my time fixing his config surely saved him hours over the project. He wasn’t a bad dev either!

You have to do a lot of the meta thinking for the agents, because they’ll take an “everything looks like a nail if you have a hammer” with their toolkit.

Writing an entire local generated asset pipeline using flux and hunyuan3D-2.1 was a really fun experience. I’ve done software for years but never game dev and it’s just so much fun even if it’s junky little games to impress my kids and get them involved in the creative process.

if it helps, I've found that using context (Claude.md etc) is way less effective for this type of pattern compared to using PreToolHook to capture "bad patterns" and either transparently rewriting them to "do the right thing" if that is possible statically, or if not then rejecting the tool use with a message that tells the agent "how" to use the intended tooling itself.

and/or write a skill

I wrote a skill and included the instruction in Claude.md to always use this skill if it ever feels like grepping around in Unity files. It still took a lot of reminding it before it did it consistently. I’d interrupt it and say “it looks like you’re using grep for something you have an explicit tool for” and it would go “oh, my bad” and do it right. Took a few days to really sink in.

Writing skills is the new writing code

Shouldn't it be possible to simply state in the contract to use that tool only? I've had good success with that in my coding.

Sure, but it turns out it isn’t guaranteed to listen. :)

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