Posted by kierangill 12/22/2025
Burn through your token limit in agent mode just to thrash around a few more times trying to identify where the agent "misunderstood" the prompt.
The only time LLM's work as coding agents for me is tightly scoped prompts with a small isolated context.
Just throwing an entire codebase into an LLM in an agentic loop seems like a fools errand.
Claude does have this specific interface for asking questions now. I've only had it choose to ask me questions on its own a very few times though. But I did have it ask clarifying questions before that interface was even a thing, when I specifically asked it to ask me clarifying questions.
Again, like a junior dev. And like a junior dev, it can also help to ask it to ask / check what its doing "mid-way", i.e. watch what it's doing and stop it, when it's running down some rabbit hole you know is not gonna yield results.
> Before you proceed, read the local and global Claude.md files and make sure you understand how we work together. Make sure you never proceed beyond your own understanding.
> Always consult the user anytime you reach a judgment call rather than just proceeding. Anytime you encounter unexpected behavior or errors, always pause and consider the situation. Rather than going in circles, ask the user for help; they are always there and available.
> And always work from understanding; never make assumptions or guess. Never come up with field names, method names, or framework ideas without just going and doing the research. Always look at the code first, search online for documentation, and find the answer to things. Never skip that step and guess when you do not know the answer for certain.
And then the Claude.md file has a much more clearly written out explanation of how we work together and how it's a consultative process where every major judgment call should be prompted to the user, and every single completed task should be tested and also asked for user confirmation that it's doing what it's supposed to do. It tends to work pretty well so far.
"Before you start, please ask me any questions you have about this so I can give you more context. Be extremely comprehensive."
(I got the idea from a Medium article[1].) The LLM will, indeed, stop and ask good questions. It often notices what I've overlooked. Works very well for me!
[1] https://medium.com/@jordan_gibbs/the-most-important-chatgpt-...
But the summary here is that with the right guidance, AI currently crushes it on large codebases.
I’d like to see dynamic task-specific context building. Write a prompt and the model starts to collect relevant instructions.
Also a review loop to check that instructions were followed.