My synopsis of this article is "just trust the agent and turn on our vendor lock in features such as auto-memory because agent is now smart where before it was dumb"
Yeah I'm not going to be doing that. I'd rather manage context myself and carefully handcraft the instructions than to rely on your marketing to tell me what I should be doing.
The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
271–280 of 434 posts
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#272I pointed Claude to this blog post and asked it to update the CLAUDE.md file accordingly. Worked a charm!
And now your CLAUDE.md is only good for Claude 5 models, not previous ones.
Or other models.
I'd much rather have open standards to follow instead of relying on vendor lock in and features automatically enforced by one company, which are not supported by others.
A good example is the agent skills open standard which was invented by anthropic but given to the public and is followed by other vendors as well
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#273> Then: Give Claude rules > Now: Let Claude use judgement No, it should follow my rules exactly. I don't care what code examples it was trained on - it will either write code the way I want, or I'll use another model.
Yeah anthropic essentially saying "just trust the agent bro" is the exact opposite a sane engineer with respect for their own craft should be doing.
Then add on the fact that their guardrails now block blue teams, purple teams, red teams and some people in biology and medicine from even getting answers.
I'm doing a pentesting course to learn application security in-depth, so I can secure my stack better.
Claude won't answer my questions anymore, so my sub has been canceled.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#274So this is cool. I recently asked Opus and Fable to "say hi" in Claude code. The "hi" cost roughly $0.50 for Opus and $1 for Fable, mostly due to the length of the system prompt. I'm eager to test the new version. If it's 80% shorter now, then saying hello should only cost Fable $0.20. Exciting times.
Do you know why they don't just cache the system prompt for everyone? It seems so wasteful not to.
A little bird may have dropped the entire system prompt on my desk.
They do customisation of the prompt per user and session. (Also apparently per IP address, based on a recent post here...)
You could still get a lot of savings if you put all the custom stuff at the end but they don't seem to do that. (Well with the old prompt anyway I haven't checked the new one yet.)
My guess as for why not, is that this is where a lot of their money comes from. So I'm honestly surprised that they removed 80% of the prompt. But I guess my mental model has some gaps in it. Maybe very few of the sessions are short enough for that to matter.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was young, a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages, which one do you think in?" I paused, confused, and replied, "People think in words?" Fast forward a decade or so, in my twenties, I had lost most of the inner visual sense I had previously used, and developed an overreliance, in my opinion, on language. (I think my dominant sense was some "non visual abstract sense of ideas", but the visual was al…
You just lack (or lacked) introspection, nothing special. Many people claim to have no inner monologue. When pressed, it always comes out. Simply put, it's impossible to function as a human without it. But many people are not aware, and think it means something like "hearing actual voices".
When I learned French as an adult, I pushed myself heavily into "forced immersion", avoiding English completely for long periods of time as my French slowly built itself up. This almost entirely silenced my inner monologue in English for those periods of time, and left me with a toddler's ability to think in French. In this comparative silence, it was much easier to observe my non-verbal thought processes moving around "behind" the scarce words.
Then my French inner monologue got good enough that I could mostly think in French, especially when I was in a French-speaking environment. One fascinating detail was that after switching from a French-speaking environment to an English-speaking one, I would actually spontaneously translate from French to English for about 15 minutes until my brain switched back.
So it seems obvious to me that it's possible to suppress or at least severely impoverish the language of thought, that other "layers" of thought exist besides the words, and that it's even possible to change the actual language of verbal thought.
Also, something which at least some other people in the HN crowd might recognize: When I'm deepest in the zone programming and refactoring, I tend to work with a lot of half articulated concepts I can't put into words. You know how people talk about "code smells"? That isn't a literal smell for me, but it's generally a non-verbal sense that a pattern is wrong.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's language and speech patterns that seem designed to trick readers into believing that claims are correct, even when the claims aren't based on anything and are possibly wrong. It was rewarded for this during training for some reason. Alternative theory: The LLMs only way to "think" about abstract concepts is through language, and this leaks into into conversation it has with humans. But humans generally prefer to…
"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language…
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Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#277My synopsis of this article is "just trust the agent and turn on our vendor lock in features such as auto-memory because agent is now smart where before it was dumb" Yeah I'm not going to be doing that. I'd rather manage context myself and carefully handcraft the instructions than to rely on your marketing to tell me what I should be doing.
I agree. I keep agent memory off. In my experience, it remembers the wrong details and applies them in the wrong places. Project context should live in the repo, where the whole team can find it, review it, and correct it.
It should be treated as an explicit artefact of the codebase for Humans and Agents to work with.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#278We should design a specific language to make sure that we can encode the exact requirements that we want. Something that has a limited set of keywords that are explicit. Wait a minute...
People joke about this, but we have actually had LLMs create compilers for our domain specific languages that lets us basically compile a bunch of code in a deterministic way for lots of varied use cases, and it has eliminated the need to always burn tokens when we want some new feature that is just a combination of existing things.
I predict this is what future “frameworks” will look like, just very high level specific languages that quickly build out some product in predictable ways every time, but you don’t need to think about complex machine logic, you’re just declaring what you want.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just thinking of this exact comic, which is etched into my brain for some reason. The obvious counter to this is that we've been going through this evolution of increasing abstraction as developers for nearly a century now. In the 40s and well into the 60s, most code was written either as straight up machine code or an assembly language. MS DOS is almost entirely assembly. UNIX ushered in the era of "high level…
Hmm. Using e.g. Claude code: I could see this as next step: "plain text editor" progresess to "with autocomplete"; using an LLM coding agent is then an abstraction over editing code. Using e.g. LLM-based system: natural language is "higher level" than program code. -- The maximal reading of "LLMs are higher level abstraction and higher level wins" would be: in the future, we'll all be writing only with natural langua…
Markdown instructions are useful as durable context, but they do not replace programming. Their job is to keep intent out of a transient chat so both the developer and agent can revisit it. The actual constraints still belong in code: types, tests, linters, and dependency rules. Natural language can explain why a boundary matters; executable checks determine whether a change respects it. That feels more like a persistent layer around the programming workflow than a new programming language.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#280I wonder how much this harms performance when using Claude Code with non-Anthropic models?
It would be interesting to see benchmarks, including these changes, of how harness affects model performance - including both model-agnostic harnesses such as OpenCode and Pi as well as increasingly model-specific ones like Claude Code and Codex.
For the model-agnostic/model-inclusive harnesses like OpenCode it would make sense (if they don't already do it) to keep the harness itself generic and then have per-model sets of skills designed to get the best performance out of each specific model.