Posted by AmazingTurtle 2 days ago
Before taking a destructive action:
- Make sure the action is clearly within
the user's request.
- Resolve the exact targets with
read-only checks when necessary.
- Do not use `$HOME`, `~`, `/`, a
workspace root, or another broad
directory as the target of a
recursive or destructive command
I've overridden my rm with this, which I threw together for fast-deletes of things like Rust target/ directories, and after seeing the GPT horror story, I taught it to flatly reject deletions directly under `/` and under home directories, with a message printing the path that it's trying to delete.
Not exactly a perfect mitigation, but given that the stated risk was the model mistakenly using the wrong $HOME, it seems like a reasonable safety. I should probably make it use an even scarier rejection notice, though.
I also... have backups.
Another thing that's preventing me from trying Codex. (the other is @ referencing files not auto including them to the context)
1M should be table stakes for frontier models at this point for programming.
Funnily enough, most anti-slop skills I found are both way too verbose and miss some common slop constructs.
I also reduced many rules from “When doing X, don’t do Y, but do Z.” Instead, the rule is “When doing X, do Z.” Fewer tokens and often works better.
I had one critical rule I was maintaining about searching the codebase using a structural index/graph and not grep. Every time the agent missed it, I asked it how to improve the rules. Eventually, I asked the AI to review that rule file and it rewrote it to be 30% smaller, but, crucially, structured to be more understandable by the LLM.
Another helpful thing was to ask AI to review my rules for things it can load on-demand when it works in that area.
Problem stems from using my own abstractions instead of common frameworks.
For a full stack session, backend + front end + docs about the part we are working on adds to that amount.
I’ve accepted it because it results in code exactly the style I would’ve written. It’s a good tradeoff to cut off the slop.
TBF having a 60k personal style guide is also a bad idea, people get borderline AI-psychosed about how their special prompts are really steering the AI when in reality there is no way to evaluate this stuff. You invariably end up trying to define your style in terms of what it is and it isn't, it's like trying to define "red". "follow the style of my 5 most recent PRs" works pretty well.
For example: upstream recently changed the effort level hotkeys so M-. would stop at xhigh, not max. If you want max, upstream, you go to the /model menu. I didn't like this change, so I undid it locally. Easy peasy.
Being open source was also a useful community lever they could pull when they were trying to catch up with Claude Code.
I had a /goal running last night for 9.5 hours straight while I slept. When I woke up in the morning it was fully on task and focused.
Write up a detailed design doc. Build a decent AGENTS.md, and write up a good prompt or /goal.
Long context can be more of a curse than a benefit sometimes anyways.