alt Hacker NewsI need to play with this more. I’ve had AI generate a bunch of small summaries that it could theoretically use to optimize future work. I haven’t asked it specifically to just dump info as it’s doing other work yet.
The files I had it generate were interesting but I’m not convinced looking at them that they contain the real info the AI needs to be more efficient. I should look into what kind of context analysis agents are passing back because that seems like what I want to save for later.
You can’t just ask AI to dump, you need to vaguely describe what design elements you think are important, like for SQL, you might want to plan our your CTEs first, then come up with a strategy for implementing each one, before getting to the SQL file itself (and of course tests, but that is a separate line of artifacts, you don’t want the AI to look at the tests when updating code, because you want to avoid letting AI code to the test). You can also look at where the AI having trouble doing something, or not doing it very well, and ask it to write documentation that will help it do that more successfully.
I can’t imagine asking AI to change some code without having a description of what the code does. You could maybe reverse engineer that, but that would basically be generating the documents after the fact. Likewise changing code without tests, where failing tests are actionable signals for the AI to make sure it doesn’t break things on update. Some people here think you can just ask it to write code without any other artifacts, thats nuts (maybe agentic will develop in the direction where AI writes persistent artifacts on its own without being told to do so, actually I’m sure that will happen eventually).