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Claude Cookbook

platform.claude.com

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Re: Claude Cookbook

#121

Post by LogicFailsMe »

mindwok wrote: post #8

Gotta be honest, almost every "how to use AI" resource seems pointless to me. I'm either going to ask the AI how to do it, or if it's about using the AI then we can just bake it into the harness or wait for Anthropic/OpenAI to do it for me because they're always trivial. All of these resources on agentic workflows, managing agent memory, harness engineering, etc. appear to just be theatre to me.

Once you understand enough to spawn independent agents for discrete tasks, it's hard to justify investing brain space into some harness that will likely be obsolete next week, if not tomorrow. And by the time the harness game converges, I suspect most of the high-end models will behave like them! Intrinsically.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#122

Post by cubefox »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #24
mindwok wrote: post #8

Gotta be honest, almost every "how to use AI" resource seems pointless to me. I'm either going to ask the AI how to do it, or if it's about using the AI then we can just bake it into the harness or wait for Anthropic/OpenAI to do it for me because they're always trivial. All of these resources on agentic workflows, managing agent memory, harness engineering, etc. appear to just be theatre to me.

Remember in 2023 when people thought "prompt engineering" would be the new software engineering and invested tons of time into learning CoT, ReAct, thread-of-thoughts, etc? Those were mostly obviated by reasoning models and harness updates by 2024. It seems pointless to invest energy into the latest/greatest AI technique or framework when they're going to either be absorbed or replaced on a 3 month cycle.

> Remember in 2023 when people thought "prompt engineering" would be the new software engineering and invested tons of time into learning CoT, ReAct, thread-of-thoughts, etc?

Prompt engineering was a GPT-3 era term, which couldn't understand instructions. Then ChatGPT came out in late 2022, which made actual prompt engineering superfluous.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#123

Post by [deleted] »

mindwok wrote: post #8

Gotta be honest, almost every "how to use AI" resource seems pointless to me. I'm either going to ask the AI how to do it, or if it's about using the AI then we can just bake it into the harness or wait for Anthropic/OpenAI to do it for me because they're always trivial. All of these resources on agentic workflows, managing agent memory, harness engineering, etc. appear to just be theatre to me.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Cookbook

#125

Post by embedding-shape »

ryandvm wrote: post #80
embedding-shape wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it clear that some people are better at working with/prompting LLMs than other people? Or is the idea that what you write to them and how you use them doesn't matter, it's all up to the model/harness? To me this seems clear, so then clearly this is a skill, which typically is called "prompt engineering". Specifically CoT or the other things you mention wasn't referred to as "prompt engineering" as far as I know…

I feel the same way about "prompt engineering" as I feel regarding the term "parkour" - you know, running and jumping on stuff. Are people really putting on their resumes that they are capable of reading and writing and appropriately defining and limiting context? That's all prompt engineering is - it's being able to communicate effectively and elucidate your objectives. Congratulations to all you English majors out…

Personally I don't, but why not? People aren't embarrassed to put their language skills ("be able to communicate in this specific language" - not special, it's just another language?), their leadership skills ("effective business communication" - big deal) or that they are a people-person ("can talk with others" - most people can do this) on their resume.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#127

Post by Centigonal »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #71
embedding-shape wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it clear that some people are better at working with/prompting LLMs than other people? Or is the idea that what you write to them and how you use them doesn't matter, it's all up to the model/harness? To me this seems clear, so then clearly this is a skill, which typically is called "prompt engineering". Specifically CoT or the other things you mention wasn't referred to as "prompt engineering" as far as I know…

I actually think that good prompting MOSTLY comes from good writing skills in general. Being able to more clearly state things to an agent, knowing what pieces of context are entirely unnecessary and which are important, having a larger vocabulary helps too. Of course, there are other areas that can improve model output (Direction rather than open-ended assistance requests, using keywords + plugins that help, the "yo…

Is Superpowers any good? My coworkers who've used it seem to think that its main purpose is to consume a lot of tokens.

Re: Claude Cookbook

#128

Post by Centigonal »

vablings wrote: post #97
NichoPaolucci wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that good prompting MOSTLY comes from good writing skills in general. Being able to more clearly state things to an agent, knowing what pieces of context are entirely unnecessary and which are important, having a larger vocabulary helps too. Of course, there are other areas that can improve model output (Direction rather than open-ended assistance requests, using keywords + plugins that help, the "yo…

Speaking a prompt with a long ramble is very powerful.

I will often do "speak a long rambling set of ideas and ask the LLM to summarize it into a prompt or spec -> manually refine -> drop refined prompt into fresh conversation"

Re: Claude Cookbook

#130

Post by nater5000 »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #83

This is definitely controversial, but I think the best CLAUDE.MD is no CLAUDE.MD at all. Every time I found myself wanting to put information into that file, I asked myself "Why isn't this already obvious from the code itself?" I don't need to tell the agent my tech stack, what DB access library I'm using, the way in which I write my tests, etc. Why? Because it's all very clearly spelled out within the code itself. I…

I've found CLAUDE.md (etc.) make more sense when the agent is doing more generalized tasks rather than just coding.

If you're just having an agent produce code, then I'd agree. I'd argue that any additional context it might need ought to be included in README.md anyways, just like a human.

But I have projects where agents do more than just code, and retaining context about how I want the agents to operate, keeping track of gotchas, avoiding unnecessary steps in the future, etc., just ends up going into CLAUDE.md. It's not for me; it's for the agents. I also never edit this file directly. I may review it every once in a while to make sure there isn't anything weird in there, but I leave it to the agent to add what it thinks is necessary (or I'll tell it that something will be relevant in the future and that it should add it, etc.).

Although even this pattern isn't necessarily future-proof. Seems like skills are kind of taking that role. Still, I end up with a CLAUDE.md in these kinds of scenarios to catch all the little pieces of context that don't fit nicely anywhere else.

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