[plaguuuuuu]

How do you keep the info the AI generates concise?

I'm grappling with this at the moment, getting it to do design or reverse engineering work, during investigation it makes the wall of text bigger rather than consolidating. It can never pause and create abstractions properly. This is on Opus which starts getting wordy and performative on goals it can't easily verify.

[arcanemachiner]

Not the person you replied to, but I find that the process involves a steady stream of nudges and fixes to the workflow, plugging the gaps as they come along, until the rate of errors shrinks to an acceptable level.

You may benefit from adding instructions like:

- Be concise, especially when X

- Do Y in this manner: [provide specific template or reference here]

- When doing X, do Y and Z

- If you notice issues, bring them to my attention instead of skipping past them.

You can also add specific templates to assist certain stages. The more guardrails or bounding you can provide, the better. Start with small nudges, and strengthen them when they fail.

It's a very unscientific process, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff once the workflow starts to hit its stride. Opus 4.8 is very good at following instructions, so don't be afraid to add them in.

Just be careful not to add things that actively encumber the workflow... It's an art, not a science. (You can also tell the clanker to tell you when your workflow rules are making things worse.)

It's annoyingly cybernetic, but these concepts have worked well for me. The curation of good process is essential to success with these damn things.

[plaguuuuuu]

I'm desperately trying to avoid nudging the AI and mopping up after it :-)

Also to deal with my own weakness, executive dysfunction

Creating experimental tooling. I don't think it's totally possible without the models improving (I miss Fable already) but you can shift the process a bit. With Claude/Opus at least, saying to "re-derive" a document is a magic phrase that carries meaning for Claude to think about totally re-doing a document.

All you need at that point is a blurb about making sure it's conceptually organised but I haven't found a neat way to express this. Kind of like refactored well-structured code is smaller than spaghetti.