[zahlman]

> However FWIW LLMs are generally good at following a specific style when given examples.

In your experience, is it worthwhile to have an agent create a "skill" for itself for following the style? Or is it a better use of context to just have it review the examples?

[badsectoracula]

TBH i actually haven't tried that at all (or "skills" in general since my PC isn't fast enough for doing much more than chatbot-style interactions with maybe the occasional -custom- MCP server to let it access files, external data, etc -- i'd love to get a second PC that i can use for LLMs, among other stuff, but that's far in the future).

Out of curiosity i just tried having the LLM generate a document describing the style, then (after a memory reset) i asked it to use the document and it did more or less the same job, however the document also had an example and the example seemed to do most of the "real job" of describing the style because at first the function docs that were generated were prefixed with 4 spaces - like the example in the doc (but the example in the doc had four spaces for indentation) and after i edited the doc to remove the spaces the function docs it generated were like those generated in the transcript i linked above.

Which makes me think that the example is the better approach (since the doc also had an example) and perhaps the best is to give an example with clarifications about the parts the example doesn't cover (like using a 80 line character limit).

FWIW when i wanted the LLM to write some new C source + header files some time ago, i also pointed it to an existing pair of C/H files to use for the code style and it worked fine, so at least in my experience examples seem to work very good.