[johntash]

I'm also skeptical partially because I don't like the huge essays generated by any llm. CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/README.md that are 5+ pages long are all equally bad imo. I prefer following the idea that if something is too verbose for me to want to get anything useful out of it, then the llm should behave similarly. Even if it's not true, why waste 2 paragraphs explaining something that could be explained in one short sentence?

My CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md is usually just a bulleted list of reminders with high level information. If the agent needs more steering, I add more reminders. I try not to give it _too_ broad of a task without prior planning or it'll just go off the rails.

Something I haven't really experimented with is having claude generate ADRs [1] like your RFC/ idea. I'll probably try that and see how it goes.

[1]: https://adr.github.io/

[jrecyclebin]

One of the main things I put in my instructions is "hey I'm a solo dev and it's just you and me working on this stuff, so I'm looking for all responses to be concise." I think it helps to give your situation so that the output can be in the proximity of "solo dev" content - which is going to be more concise and practical by nature.

Kind of like telling it to generate Ghibli pics. These things are best at imitation.

[johntash]

That's probably a good one to keep in there, I'll try it too. Maybe it'll help with the "Here's the plan:" where it starts listing phases and hours/days/weeks for each phase even though it's going to be doing most of the work asap