[tedbradley]

With smarter models, Anthropic recommends laying off on giving it too much precise hand-holding, too. Early r/promptengineering had a bunch of the craziest prompts that usually did almost nothing or nothing at all. The subreddit turned into a place where every post was trying to sell some vibe-coded website "product."

Context management is still important, though. If you get to a certain amount of context, things start performing really badly.

[matltc]

Prompt engineering was deprecated around the time Opus-/Codex-class models dropped imo. Replaced by skills up until about opus 4.5/6 dropped. Pinned model to Opus 4.6 slug in ENV.ANTHROPIC_MODEL, disabled the adaptive thinking thing, and saw my skills start causing degradation

Only ones I use today are for very specific quirks (eg wiredtiger/mongodb 8+ incompatible with ext4/Linux 6.19+ specifically causing segfaults. Have a 20 line mongo skill that says as much. Pinned docker container to mongo 7, can prob delete it now)

I spent a few days reading up on the docs for these things, hook lifecycles, tried writing a few, but they never work as documented, or the documentation changes so frequently that whatever you built is deprecated by the time you get it humming.

Now if I have some non-trivial unit of work, I basically iterate on spec in plan mode then put it on auto and let it rip. Way better results with Fable. jury out on Opus 5, but no regression like 4.7/8

Usually it's just echo "do this lil thing then pr closing issue 123" --model sonnet --effort low. Works well enough, sonnet 5 low is a workhorse and quite resourceful in a good way when things go sideways; doesn't cheat its way out IME

[petra]

They probably took our skills and reuse them. That's why skills do not matter anymore.