Discussion
Daily Dose of Data Science
bagrow: Here's a question that I hope is not too off-topic.Do people find the nano-banana cartoon infographics to be helpful, or distracting? Personally, I'm starting to tire seeing all the little cartoon people and the faux-hand-drawn images.Wouldn't Tufte call this chartjunk?
push0ret: I haven't come around any AI generated imagery in documents / slides that adds any value. It's more the opposite, they stand out like a sore thumb and often even reduce usability since text cannot be copied. Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI.
galoisscobi: > Most people either write too much or too little. Here’s what works.> Two folders, not oneWhy post AI slop here?
manudaro: The .claude folder structure reminds me of how Terraform organizes state files. Smart move putting conversation history in Json rether than some propiertary format, makes it trivial to grep through old conversations or build custom analysis tools.
TheRoque: So that's what "software engineering" has become nowadays ? Some cargo cult basically. Seriously all of this gives red flag. No statements here are provable. It's just like langhchain that was praised and then everyone realized it's absolute dog water. Just like MCP too. The job in 2026 is really sad.
ramon156: LinkedIn loves these, even if they're broken.But they had already lost me at all the links, and the fact there's not a red wire through the entire article.The first thing my eyes skimmed was:> CLAUDE.md: Claude’s instruction manual> This is the most important file in the entire system. When you start a Claude Code session, the first thing it reads is CLAUDE.md. It loads it straight into the system prompt and keeps it in mind for the entire conversation.No it's not. Claude does not read this until it is relevant. And if it does, it's not SOT. So no, it's argumentatively not the most important file.
browningstreet: I think it's fine. As someone who blogged a lot, the instant visual differentiation among articles offered by the art within is actually valuable.
simonw: My eye has started skipping past them, even though they're often quite useful if you engage with them.I think the problem is that they're uninformative slop often enough that I've subconsciously determined they aren't worth risking attention time on.
exitb: I’m seeing this more and more, where people build this artificial wall you supposedly need to climb to try agentic coding. That’s not the right way to start at all. You should start with a fresh .claude, empty AGENTS.md, zero skills and MCP and learn to operate the thing first.
heliumtera: Operate == me send https post and pray for the best
jwilliams: > Simply put: whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow.No.CLAUDE.md is just prompt text. Compaction rewrites prompt text.If it matters, enforce it in other ways.
taormina: Exactly!
rvz: "Thinking" is about to get even harder to do for most grifters with newsletters to sell.
graypegg: I think I'm finding a pretty good niche for myself honestly. IMO, Software engineering is more so splitting into different professions based on the work is produces.This sort of "prompt and pray" flow really works for people, as in they can make products and money, however, I do think the people that succeed today also would've reached for no-code tools 5 years ago and seen similar success. It's just faster and more comprehensive now. I think the general theme of the products remains the same though; not un-important or worthless, but it tends to be software that has effects that say INSIDE the realm of software. I feel like there's always been a market for that, as it IS important, it's just not WORTH the time and money to the right people to "engineer" those tools. A lot of SaaS products filled that niche for many years.While it's not a way I want to work, I am also becoming comfortable with respecting that as a different profession for producing a certain brand of software that does have value, and that I wasn't making before. The intersection of that is opportunity I'm missing out on; no fault to anyone taking it!The software engineer that writes the air traffic avoidance system for a plane better take their job seriously, understand every change they make, and be able to maintain software indefinitely. People might not care a ton about how their sales tracking software is engineered, but they really care about the engineering of the airplane software.
baal80spam: > prompt and prayThis is a brilliant reimagining of the old and trusted PnP acronym.
dietr1ch: That's the goal, keep spending tokens and claim you are super productive because of it
elcapitan: When I see AI images, I skip them, and most likely, the entire article. They're a better warning sign than the ones hidden in the text.
unshavedyak: Claude itself will grep through old conversations so it’s handy that Claude understands too
Synthetic7346: I wish all model providers would converge on a standard set of files, so I could switch easily from Claude to Codex to Cursor to Opencode depending on the situation
embedding-shape: Issue is that both harness and specific model matters a lot in what type of instruction works best, if you were to use Anthrophic's models together with the best way to do prompting with Codex and GPT models, you'd get a lot worse results compared to if you use GPT models with Codex, prompted in the way GPTs react best to them.I don't think people realize exactly how important the specific prompts are, with the same prompt you'd get wildly different results for different models, and when you're iterating on a prompt (say for some processing), you'd do different changes depending on what model is being used.
freedomben: Having experimented with soft-linking AGENTS.md into CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md, this lines up well with my experience. I now just let each time maintain it's own files and don't try to combine them. If it's something like my custom "## Agent Instructions" then I just copy-pasta and it's not been hard, and since that section is mostly identical I just treat AGENTS.md as the canonical and copy/paste any changes over to the others.
63stack: The article starts off really weak:>Claude Code users typically treat the .claude folder like a black box. They know it exists. They’ve seen it appear in their project root. But they’ve never opened it, let alone understood what every file inside it does.I know we are living in a post-engineering world now, but you can't tell me that people don't look at PRs anymore, or their own diffs, at least until/if they decide to .gitignore .claude.
sunir: You’re assuming most people using Claude code are senior engineers.
politelemon: And that we're living in a post engineering world.
freedomben: Most of the time I find them distracting, and sometimes a huge negative on the article. In this particular article though, they're well done and relevant, and I think they add quite a bit. It's a highly personal opinion kind of thing though for sure.
SV_BubbleTime: Yeah, I’ve been considering this. They’re going to start removing em dashes, which currently is a surefire way to detect AI text.Let’s say lose those and using emojis as bullet points. It’s going to be a lot harder to detect.
SV_BubbleTime: The first one is actually quite good.Some of the others, I don’t feel like added value, but I agree that these are some of the best of a practice that I agreed does not add a ton of value typically
phyzix5761: Is there a completely free coding assistant agent that doesn't require you to give a credit card to use it?I recently tried IntelliJ for Kotlin development and it wanted me to give a credit card for a 30 day trial. I just want something that scans my repo and I tell it the changes I want and it does it. If possible, it would also run the existing tests to make sure its changes don't break anything.
bhaak: Gemini Code Assist has a free tier.You log in with your Goggle account.
freedomben: I totally agree with you that this not the right way to start. But, in my experience, the more you use the tool the more of a "feel" you get for it, and knowing how all these different pieces work and line up can be quite useful (though certainly not mandatory). It's been immensely frustrating to me how difficult it is to find all this info with all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.
embedding-shape: > all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.Isn't this article just another one in that same drawer?> What actually belongs in CLAUDE.md - Write: - Import conventions, naming patterns, error handling stylesThen just a few lines below:> Don’t write: - Anything that belongs in a linter or formatter configThe article overall seems filled with internal inconsistencies, so I'm not sure this article is adding much beyond "This is what an LLM generated after I put the article title with some edits".
sunir: When was it not a cargo cult?
GaggiX: It may be survivorship bias, you only notice the AI ones that are bad.
spunker540: Yeah there are almost certainly times when it is gen ai and you just didn’t notice.
forgotusername6: If these different agents could agree on a standard location that would be great. The specs are almost the same for .github and Claude but Claude won't even look at the .github location.
sarchertech: I think this is mostly right. The primary difference is that with no code you had to change platforms, but the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.It shouldn’t be, but it’s going to take some catastrophic events to convince people that we have to work to make sure we understand the systems we’re building and keep everything from devolving into vibe coded slop.
graypegg: > the Prompt and Pray method can be brought to bear on any software easily even the air traffic avoidance system.I guess that's why I see it as a separate profession, as in we have to actually profess a standard for how a professional in our field acts and believes. I think it's OK for it to bifurcate into two different fields, but Software Engineering would need to specifically reject prompt-and-pray on a principled and rational basis.Sadly yes, that might require real cost to life in order to find out the "why" side of that rational basis. If you meet anyone that went to an engineering school in Québec, ask them about the ring they received. [0][0] https://ironring.ca/home-en/ > [The] history of the 1907 failure of the Quebec City bridge, which was the inspiration for the Calling of an Engineer ceremony.
bityard: There are lots! Too many to cover in a single HN comment, and this space is evolving rapidly so I encourage you to look around.While the coding assistants are pretty much universally free, you still need to connect them to a model. The model tokens generally cost something once you've gone past a certain quota.I'm not sure if this is still true, but if you have a Google account, Gemini Code Assist had a quite generous "free tier" that I used for a while and found it do be pretty decent.
rdevilla: The fuck? What's next, configuring maven and pom.xml? At least XML is unambiguous, well specified, and doesn't randomly refuse to compile 2% of the time..
dbmikus: Are there any good guides on how to write prompt files tailored to different agents?Would also be interested in examples of a CLAUDE.md file that works well in Claude, but works poorly with Codex.
btucker: It's not necessarily an AI-generated infographics issue, it's that these aren't good infographics. The graphic part is adding minimal value.
saadn92: The claim that "whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In practice CLAUDE.md is a suggestion, not a contract. Complex tasks and compaction will dilute the use of CLAUDE.md, especially once the context window runs out.
submeta: Tangential: The image with the heading "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder" is nicely made, anyone knows what tool is used for it?
frizlab: Completely tangential, but can we please stop putting one million files at the root of the project which have nothing to do with the project? Can we land on a convention like, idk, a `.meta` folder (not the meta company, the actual word), or whatever, in which all of these Claude.md, .swift-version, Code-of-Conduct.md, Codeowners, Contributing.md, .rubocop.yml, .editorconfig, etc. files would go??
flurdy: I was glad when linux went with the .config standard for most dotfiles.
jameshart: Yes, but as soon as you start checking in and sharing access to a project with other developers these things become shared.Working out how to work on code on your own with agentic support is one thing. Working out how to work on it as a team where each developer is employing agentic tools is a whole different ballgame.
georgeburdell: In my own group, agentic coding made sharing and collaboration go out the window because Claude will happily duplicate a bunch of code in a custom framework
mitchell_h: In my AGENTS.md I have two lines in almost every single one: - Under no condition should you use emoji's. - Before adding a new function, method or class. Scan the project code base, and attached frame works to verify that something else can not be modified to fit the needs.
heliumtera: And why would they ever let switch?
Synthetic7346: Interoperability means that people could switch to them as well
dataviz1000: Claude Fast has very good alternate documentation for this. [0] I don't understand the hate for defining .claude/ . It is quite easy to have the main agent write the files. Then rather doing one shot coding, instead iterate quickly updating .claude/ I'm at the point where .claude/ makes copies of itself, performs the task, evaluates, and updates itself. I'm not coding code, I'm coding .claude/ which does everything else. This is also a mechanism for testing .claude, agents, and instructions which would be useful for sharing and reuse in an organization.[0] https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery
matsemann: I never trust them to actually be correct. Aka they're probably worse than useless.
dhorthy: I think one of the main examples that i saw in a swyx article a while back is that using the sort of ALL CAPS and *IMPORTANT* language that works decently with claude will actually detune the codex models and make them perform worse. I will see if I can find the post
dgb23: This is correct. All of these .md files are just blobs of text that the LLM matches against. They might increase the likelihood of something happening or not happening.They look to me like people actually want to build deterministic workflows, but blobs of text are the wrong approach for that. The right tool is code that controls the agent through specific states and validates the tool calls step by step.
Fishkins: I agree with most of this, with one important exception: you should have some form of sandboxing in place before running any local AI agent. The easiest way to do that is with .claude/settings.json[0].This is important no matter how experienced you are, but arguable the most important when you don't know what you're doing.0: or if you don't want to learn about that, you can use Claude Code Web
sroussey: Do people really run claude and other clis like this outside a container??
kenforthewin: Let's not fool ourselves here. If a security feature adds any amount of friction at all, and there's a simple way to disable it, users will choose to do so.
