this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
105 points (83.4% liked)
Technology
83929 readers
2566 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, it's not the same as copying and pasting the TODO into a prompt. Embedding the TODO in code instead of the prompt reduces tokens burned and increases accuracy because it's observing the TODO in context. Sure you can write more prompting to provide that context, but it still won't be as accurate. The less context you provide via prompting and instead provide more context through automatic deterministc feedback the better the results
Okay so now I think you're describing the behaviour I take for granted with the harness i.e. Claude Code.
Having good repo readiness through a good agents/claude.md file + tests + docs means the LLM is able to read more files into its context.
It never occurred to me that anyone would prompt in isolation of their repos but I guess thats exactly what it was like for me last year when I was just feeding ChatGPT prompts away from the repo.
Yes, code harnesses help by providing deterministic feedback like with a language server and reduce the amount of prompting requirements. I guess I should have led with that example 😅
Gotcha...I've always struggled to pick up the vocabulary around technical concepts - I guess ive just never prioritised it, and now this whole new field has materialised with a whole new vocabulary to go along with it! I get the tech. The words are my achilles heel.