alt Hacker NewsA bunch of these should be enforce with linting, that way people who still hand-craft code get the same kind of feedback, e.g. Always use {}, even on a one-line "if" statement. & Keep function names short. Less than 30 characters.
Then this one really is a pattern that creates a lot of churn:
- Add a small, to the point, comment to explain what the block does and why. Use examples when possible. Propose ASCII drawings to explain complete systems.
The what _is_ the code.
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I would never tell an agent to write "what does the code do" comments. Their default comments are already way too fluffy.
One thing I don’t get with a lot of these agents.md and other skills are… why not throw as much mechanical checks and other stuff at the repo to constrain as you want instead of asking a non-deterministic agent (squishy or non-squishy) to maintain it.
With the mechanical routes, we get checks, failures, and so much more. A bit wild to me.
Make an agent operate within defined constraints and yell at it when it doesn’t.
My biggest pet peeve with agents is when people beg their (non-deterministic) agents to do something that a lint rule could've accomplished
Right. I've really struggling to get AI to stop explaining the what. It seems to add it to the commits, PRs, code, wherever it feels like. I've put in multiple places to not write the "what", but the "why", and in multiple ways, but it still does it in one or other place.