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by michalsustr 145 days ago
As someone said: Custom lints are super useful.

What we do at https://minfx.ai (a Neptune/Wandb replacement) is we use TONS of custom lints. Anytime we see some undesireable repeatable agent behavior, we add it as a prompt modification and a lint. This is relatively easy to do in Rust. The kinds of things I did are:

- Specify maximum number of lines / tabs, otherwise code must be refactored.

- Do not use unsafe or RefCells.

- Do custom formatting, where all code looks the same: order by mods, uses, constants, structs/enums, impls, etc. In particular, I added topological ordering (DAG-ordering) of structs, so when I review code, I build up understanding of what the LLM actually did, which is faster than to read the intermediate outputs.

- Make sure there are no "depedency cycles": internal code does not use public re-exports, so whenever you click on definitions, you only go DEEPER in the code base or same file, you can't loop back.

- And more :-)

Generally I find that focusing on the code structure is super helpful for dev and for the LLM as well, it can find the relevant code to modify much faster.

1 comments

What is DAG ordering of structs?
Each struct and its referenced fields can be thought of as a graph which can be sorted. Ideally, it is a DAG, but sometimes you can have recursive structures so it can be a cyclic graph. By DAG-ordering a I meant a topological sorting such that you do it by layers of the graph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph

DAG is directed acyclic graph. A bit like a tree where branches are allowed to merge but there are no cycles.
Yes, but I was wondering how organize your code in a DAG.
Identifiers correspond to nodes and a mention of an identifier in the definition of another corresponds to a directed edge. The resulting graph won't necessarily be acyclic, but you can still use it to inform the order in which you present definitions, e.g. newspaper style starts with the most high-level function and puts the low-level details at the end: https://pypi.org/project/flake8-newspaper-style/
Yes exactly! Good idea to extend it to functions as well