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i think im more careful about typos in my prompting than i am in my slack messages

interesting. why?

i have a bad theory of mind for LLMs and treat their attention as limited in ways similar to that of a human

also im somewhat partial to the argument that clean, typo-free prose overlaps in latent space with the set of all good engineering practices

i like that argument i'm going to adopt it

LLMs absolutely do respond differently based on where your prompt lands in latent space. lists of explicit rules to follow spelled out in exacting detail push into "sr engineer berating a jr engineer that just fucked up". co-workers trusting each other and working through a problem works better.

The why / framing matters more then the telling. They respond well of you give a reasonable reason, like we are pre-release, with no users, you don't need compatibility, versioning right now

i have a boilerplate README that i started using which says "this project is brand new, has no users, does not need backwards compatibility layers" etc etc to get claude to actually start cutting into load-bearing walls without hedging

My bile refactoring skill is the only thing that has ever gotten claude to really think big about reshaping my code bases in a substantial way - I love to run it after I have gotten a project roughly in the direction I want to really improve the underlying design and architecture of the code

Bold refactor*