Comment by serial_dev

Comment by serial_dev 3 days ago

13 replies

I’m sure I’m just working like a caveman, but I simply highlight the relevant code, add it to the chat, and talk to these tools as if they were my colleagues and I’m getting pretty good results.

About 12 to 6 months ago this was not the case (with or without .md files), I was getting mainly subpar result, so I’m assuming that the models have improved a lot.

Basically, I found that they not make that much of a difference, the model is either good enough or not…

I know (or at least I suppose) that these markdown files could bring some marginal improvements, but at this point, I don’t really care.

I assume this is an unpopular take because I see so many people treat these files as if they were black magic or silver bullet that 100x their already 1000x productivity.

vanviegen 3 days ago

> I simply highlight the relevant code, add it to the chat, and talk to these tools

Different use case. I assume the discussion is about having the agent implement whole features or research and fix bugs without much guidance.

  • 0xblacklight 3 days ago

    Yep it is opinionated for how to get coding agents to solve hard problems in complex brownfield codebases which is what we are focused on at humanlayer :)

rmnclmnt 3 days ago

Matches my experience also. Bothered only once to setup a proper CLAUDE.md file, and now never do it. Simply refering to the context properly for surgical recommendations and edit works relatively well.

It feels a lot like bikeshedding to me, maybe I’m wrong

wredcoll 3 days ago

How about a list of existing database tables/columns so you don't need to repeat it each time?

  • girvo 3 days ago

    I gave it a tool to execute to get that info if required, but it mostly doesn’t need to due to Kysely migration files and the database type definition being enough.

  • anonzzzies 3 days ago

    Claude code figures that out at startup every time. Never had issues with it.

    • theshrike79 2 days ago

      You can save some precious context by having it somewhere without it having to figure it out from scratch every time.

  • HDThoreaun 3 days ago

    Do you not use a model file for your orm?

    • wredcoll 3 days ago

      ORMs are generally a bad idea, so.. hopefully not?

      • girvo 3 days ago

        Even without the explicit magic ORMs, with data mapper style query builders like Kysely and similar, I still find I need to marshall selected rows into objects to, yknow, do things with them in a lot of cases.

        Perhaps a function of GraphQL though.

        • wredcoll 3 days ago

          Sure, but that's not the same thing. For example, whether or not you have to redeclare your entire database schema in a custom ORM language in a different repo.