Live data from Hacker News

Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

blog.dailydoseofds.com

251–260 of 312 posts

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the grill me skill went viral - https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/grill-me/SKIL...

I asked Claude whether these elaborate words like "walk down the design tree" actually mean anything to the LLM and make a difference. The answer confirmed my gut feeling: You can just tell me to "be critical" and get mostly the same results. Matt did incredible work teaching people TS, but this feels more like trying to create FOMO to sell snake oil and AI courses.

It feels to me that "walk down the design tree" has a specific meaning with respect to treating the design as a hierarchy (although whether that means BFS or DFS is still ambiguous). "Be critical" lacks that specificity.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#252
post #250

So when Anthropic releases a new model that "breaks compatibility" with some Markdown files, do we call it "refactoring" to find (guess) the required changes to have the desired outcome again? Don't we create brittle specifications to fit a version of a model?

Use evals Coming soon, unit, behavioural and regression tests for your prompts and skills :P

How do you use evals when you’re using Claude Code, given that Claude Code also changes their prompts all the time?

You’ll have:

* Claude model version

* Claude Code prompts and tools

* Your own prompts and skills and whatnot

* Your repository’s source code (= the input)

All of those change constantly, it’s not like it’s some kind of SWE benchmark.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me give you a counterexample. I'm working on a product for the national market, and i need to do all financial tasks, invoicing, submit to national fiscal databse etc. through a local accounting firm. So i integrate their API in the backend; this is a 100% custom API developed by this small european firm, with a few dozen restful enpoints supporting various accounting operations, and I need to use it programmatic…

What exactly does it do that a professional would charge you thousands for? (I'm genuinely asking)

The basic problem is that the reporting and accounting rules are double plus bureaucratic and you need to have on hand multiple registers that show the financial situation at any time, submit them to the tax authority etc.

To give you a small taste: you need to issue an electronic invoice for each unique customer, and submit on the fly the tax authority - but these need to correlated monthly with the money in your business bank account. The paid invoices don't just go into your bank account, they are disbursed from time to time by the payment processor, on random dates that don't sync with the accounting month, so at end of month you have to have correlate precisely what invoice is paid or not. But wait, the card processor won't just send you the money in a lump sum, it will deduct from each payment some random fee that is determined by their internal formula, then, at the end of each month, add all those deducted fees (even for payments that have not been paid to you) and issue another invoice to you, which you need to account for in you books as being partially paid each month (from the fees deducted from payments already disbursed). You also have other payment channels, each with their fees etc. So I need to balance this whole overlapping intervals mess with all sort of edge cases, chargebacks and manual interventions I refuse to think about again.

This is one example, but there are also issues with wages and their taxation, random tax law changes in the middle of the month etc. The accountant can of course solve all this for you, but once you go a few hundred invoices per month (if you sell relatively cheap services) you are considered a "medium" business, so instead of paying for basic accounting services less than 100€ per month (have the certified accountant look over your books and sign them, as required by law), you will need more expensive packages which definitely add up to thousands in a few months.

Go be an entrepreneur, they said.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#254
post #132

Building your AI agent "toolkit" is becoming the equivalent of the perfect "productivity" setup where you spend your time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos telling you how to be productive and creating habits and rituals...only to be overtaken by a person with a simple paper list of tasks that they work through. Plain Claude, ask it to write a plan, review plan, then tell it to execute still works the best…

This is what I do; frankly I can't be arsed to take the time to write all these commands and skills and whatnot. I did use /init to get Claude to create a CLAUDE.md file, and I occasionally -- very occasionally -- go through it and correct anything that's no longer valid due to code changes (and then ask Claude to do the same).

But beyond that, I just ask it what I want it to ask, and that's it. I'm not convinced that putting more time into building the "toolbox" will actually give me significant returns on that time.

I do think that some of this (commands, skills, breaking up CLAUDE.md into separate rules files) can be useful, but it's highly context-dependent, and I think YAGNI applies here: don't front-load this work. Only set those up if you run into specific problems or situations where you think doing this work will make Claude work better.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#257
post #5

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.

trial, pray, error, trial ... such a waste of energy and talent

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#258
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked Claude whether these elaborate words like "walk down the design tree" actually mean anything to the LLM and make a difference. The answer confirmed my gut feeling: You can just tell me to "be critical" and get mostly the same results. Matt did incredible work teaching people TS, but this feels more like trying to create FOMO to sell snake oil and AI courses.

It feels to me that "walk down the design tree" has a specific meaning with respect to treating the design as a hierarchy (although whether that means BFS or DFS is still ambiguous). "Be critical" lacks that specificity.

Yes but then it’s better to spell those instructions out explicitly, eg state facts, state ambiguities / assumptions, inspect codebase, challenge assumptions, etc.

This particular skill is not great.

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do people really run claude and other clis like this outside a container??

Yes. I don't bother with that. I feel like the risk of Claude Code running amok is pretty low, and I don't have it do long-running tasks that exceeds my desire to monitor it. (Not because I'm worried about it breaking things, it's just I don't use the tool in that way.)

Re: Anatomy of the .claude/ folder

#260
post #53
post #2

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?

It's not necessarily an AI-generated infographics issue, it's that these aren't good infographics. The graphic part is adding minimal value.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN