alt Hacker News> But if I tell it "read these files that use the same conventions" first, there's no misunderstanding, and the agent also picks up the general "tone" of the code. I have very little to tweak if I've defined the problem well.
Oh that is a bloomin' great idea, and I can fully see how it might work better.
Can't tell you how valuable this comment has been to me and now I feel so much better about evidently kicking a hornet's nest ;-) Thank you so much.
Glad I could help. I've been trying to use coding agents more than makes sense this year to get a feel for the tech. There's no good set of guidelines yet and everything feels like secret knowledge.
If you're using a coding agent like codex or claude code, I've also seen marked improvement by telling the agent to keep a journal of decision points, and every file read or written. And then, here's the important part, read the last five journals before starting. It primes the context with whatever you were working on and keeps a new session more focused that if it has to go searching for keywords through the whole codebase. It can also be an interesting read.