| > In my experience (so far), I can’t let the LLM write too much in one go. Second, but I've found a cheat code to make it much farther with minimal intervention. Step 1: tell them your goal, have them generate a doc, include design principals, system invariants, and acceptance criteria. No amount of CLAUDE.md or skills beats re-iterating the focus points directly in the prompt. Step 2: tell them to summarize the doc (pay close attention here). Have them save it somewhere (I use docs/agents) once you're happy with it. Step 3: tell them to build a detailed plan to meet the objectives of the doc. Step 4: let them go wild. Step 5: once they declare "done", feed their progress to another LLM (Gemini is quite decent for review, and free) -> mindlessly feed the feedback back to the implementing LLM. Step 6: Say the magic words: https://github.com/cuzzo/clear/blob/master/docs/retrospectiv... Again, I've found no amount of skills or CLAUDE.md beats slightly modifying a prompt to meet your exact goals specific to the design and what you know of the implementation so far. Step 7: Have them rebuild a plan to address feedback. Step 8: Let them go wild. Loop back to Step 5 until the LLMs tell you there's no major action items. Step 9: Tell them to remove anything from the commit that's not strictly necessary, get rid of comment changes that aren't strictly necessary, etc. Step 10: here and only here do you invest your time (worth 100x what you're paying them) to look at what they did. Here you can give them feedback to address anything you saw. Step 11: Review. Step 12: Profit $$$ I got a quite decent implementation of Finite State Machine and Thunk + Trampoline transformation of code in custom language I'm building in about 1 day, barely checking in while commuting to and from work on the train... Occassionally, at step 11, you will find a gigantic turd and wonder how the LLMs converged on this. But, typically, it's at least good enough at that stage. I don't even waste my time looking at anything they've done until they've converged on a good design and implementation with no holes, no feedback, no notes that does what a minimal, summarized doc clearly states and follows the design principles. Because they DEFINITELY haven't in a one-shot. |