HN user

AlexMoffat

92 karma
Posts2
Comments31
View on HN

Claude’s prompt heavily pushes it towards grep. We have an internal cross repo semantic search mcp and to get Claude to consistently use it a skill and prompting was not enough. A pre tool use hook is the answer. Claude will even write one for you if you describe the problem to it :)

I ask it to write a markdown file describing how it should go about performing the task. Then have it read the file next time. Works well for things like creating tests for controller methods where there is a procedure it should follow that was probably developed over a session with several prompts and feedback on its output.

The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.

The counterpoint is that if you don’t adopt a framework you end up with a “framework” you built yourselves that people outside your team don’t understand, is generally poorly documented and needs constant work to add features existing frameworks already have. There are common features needed on the FE and common problems to solve, why not at least start with something instead of nothing?

The words you're looking for aren't conservative or reactionary they are bigoted and asshole. Best software engineer I've ever worked with is a woman, the rest had exactly the same range of ability as the men. Overall though a much lower level of entitled ignorance than "guys like us".

“Treat your users as you would a class of pre-school children. If they’re all screaming for a snack you don’t necessarily give them one, perhaps a healthy lunch would be better for the underlying need.”

All the occasions you mention are covered in the blog. The sarin attack is used to demonstrate that even in the best conditions for the attacker they would not be effective in a military sense against modern first tier armies. As a terror weapon yes but the question is why don’t modern militaries plan to use them. It doesn’t rest on perfect efficiency. At this point the US, for example, doesn’t have the quantity needed for battlefield and no procedures for deploying them.

“but we value choice and freedom over rules and processes.” Who could argue with that? It can sound pretty defensive though, like we know we have a bunch of nearly random stuff that few people can really understand and manage but, hey, freedom. Lisp has always been interesting and there’s always one or two companies in any time interval that are successful, and wildly so, using it. It could also be as much skill, great execution and a market.