It is for this reason that I usually keep an "adr" folder in my repo to capture Architecture Decision Record documents in markdown. These allow the agent to get the "why" when it needs to. Useful for humans too.

The challenge is really crafting your main agent prompt such that the agent only reads the ADRs when absolutely necessary. Otherwise they muddy the context for simple inside-the-box tasks.

I don't doubt your sincerity. But this represents an absolutely bonkers disparity compared to the reality I'm experiencing.

I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them.

Hearing things like this does give me a little hope though, as I think it means the total collapse of the software engineering industry is probably still a few years away, if so many companies are still so far behind the curve.

> It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility.

I prefer walking or cycling and often walk about 8km a day around town, for both mobility and exercise. (Other people's) automobiles make my experience worse, not better.

I'm sure there's an analogy somewhere.

(Sure, automobiles improve the speed of mobility, if that's the only thing you care about...)

I don't think I'm asking for something unreasonable: I'll believe this actually speeds up software creation when one of my vendors starts getting me software faster. That's not some crazy ludditism on my part, I don't think?

> I don't use LLMs much

Sorry to be so blunt, but it's not surprising that you aren't able to get much value from these tools, considering you don't use them much.

Getting value from LLMs / agents is a skill like any other. If you don't practice it deliberately, you will likely be bad at it. It would be a mistake to confuse lack of personal skill for lack of tool capability. But I see people make this mistake all the time.

Would be helpful if you pointed out what I did wrong :).

If it's "you didn't explain the problem clearly enough", then that aligns with my original comment.

If you ask the chatbot for best practices it will tell you, including that you don't use a chatbot.

Allow me a momentary rant...

I love Claude Code and use it all day, every day for work. I would self identify as an unofficial Claude Code evangelist amongst my coworkers and friends.

But Claude Code is buggy as hell. Flicker is still present. Plugin/skill configuration is an absolute shitshow. The docs are (very) outdated/incomplete. The docs are also poorly organized, embarrassingly so. I know Claude Code's feature set quite well, and I still have a hard time navigating their docs to find a particular thing sometimes. Did you know Claude Code supports "rules" (similar to the original Cursor Rules)? Find where they are documented, and tell me that's intuitive and discoverable. I'm sorry, but with an unlimited token (and I assume, by now, personnel) budget, there is no excuse for the literal inventors of Claude Code to have documentation this bad.

I seriously wish they would spend some more cycles on quality rather than continuing to push so many new features. I love new features, but when I can't even install a plugin properly (without manual file system manipulation) because the configuration system is so bugged, inscrutable, and incompletely documented, I think it's obvious that a rebalancing is needed. But then again, why bother if you're winning anyway?

Side note: comparing it to Gemini CLI is simply cruel. No one should ever have to use or think about Gemini CLI.

Are you me? Patriot is amazing and I will never stop recommending it no matter how many dumbfounded looks I get.

I have a framed "Structural Dynamics of Flow" poster on my wall in my home office, visible on Teams calls. Only 1 person has ever recognized the reference.

Then, of course, you've seen L.G. Claret's website!

gosh, the scene where he stumbles into the lecture hall, almost late, and then delivers a flawless retro-encapulator-esque pitch... that had me giddy.

The preposterously long rock-paper-scissors scene had me laughing tears.

You need to give it the tools to check its own work, and remove yourself from that inner low-level error resolution loop.

If you're building a web app, give it a script that (re)starts the full stack, along with Playwright MCP or Chrome DevTools MCP or agent-browser CLI or something similar. Then add instructions to CLAUDE.md on how and when to use these tools. As in: "IMPORTANT: You must always validate your change end-to-end using Playwright MCP, with screenshot evidence, before reporting back to me that you are finished.".

You can take this further with hooks to more forcefully enforce this behavior, but it's usually not necessary ime.

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.

Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.

It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.

Ok, but how many months until O365 Copilot is good?

I feel like the value would be in analyzing those rich traces with another agent to extract (failure) patterns and learnings, as part of a flywheel setup. As a human I would rarely if ever want to look at this -- I don't even have time to look at the final code itself!

> value would be in analyzing those rich traces with another agent to extract (failure) patterns and learnings

Claude Code supports hooks. This allows me to run an agent skill at the end of every agent execution to automatically determine if there were any lessons worth learning from the last session. If there were. new agent skills are automatically created or existing ones automatically updated as apporpriate.

Yes, I've done the same. But the issue is that the agent tends to learn too many lessons, or to overfit those lessons to that single session. I think the benefit of a tool like this is that you can give that agent a wider view when formulating recommendations.

Completely agree. But I wonder how much of that is just accomplished with well placed code comments that explain the why for future agent interactions to prevent them from misunderstanding. I have something like this in my AGENTS.md.

Try running `/insights` with Claude Code.

There is no such command, according to the docs [0]. /s

I continue to find it painfully ironic that the Claude Code team is unable to leverage their deep expertise and unlimited token budget to keep the docs even close to up-to-date automatically. Either that or they have decided accurate docs aren't important.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/interactive-mode#built-in-co...

This 100%. I'm not sure why the author as well as so many in the thread are assuming a ToS ban was literally instant and had to be due to what the author was doing in that moment. Could have been for something the author did hours, days, or weeks ago. There would be no way to know.

All the more reason they should have to tell you.