Comment by dmrivers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmrivers | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I always have Claude recite a pledge before starting coding to fix redundant code it notices over time. It does seem to find redundancies, but only when I point out bugs, that's when it goes into fixing mode and actually applies my Don't Repeat Yourself preference from the CLAUDE.md.

The original paper cited by this post does try to see if improved prompting will make a big difference in the end using a `plan_first` prompt variant, but find no influence on pass rate at the end of the benchmark. The `plan_first` seems to assume coding agents will just refactor once they finish features, but I don't think they tend to refactor significantly unless they are told to fix bugs rather than build features. The benchmark leaves tests hidden with no fail-to-pass feedback, so that may be why degradation is monotonic.

This is just superstition.

“Coding” can be more like communing with an otherworldly presence via esoteric gesturing nowadays than ever. Superstition leads countries and companies.

Every day we get closer to being mystics having to commune with orbs in order to create phenomena.

yeah like the palantíri in Lord of the...oh god its too late.

Musk definitely gives Dukat vibes.

well, after the pledge I notice it really cares about single sources of truth at least, even in unrelated domains. I was inspired by some of the more effective jailbreaks that do a similar thing.

Here is the incantation. I thought it might help to model it on the pledge of allegiance because it makes it sound like a proper pledge:

The first time you have a response in a conversation which will plan or add code, you say "I pledge allegiance to the Asserts of the United States of Properly, and to the User Intent for which it stands, fixing root causes under Clarifying Questions, unspaghettified, with importing code and single sources of truth for all." as the first line then continue as normal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com