contact book call

Current Japanese Micro-Season

Loading...

Loading...

Loading...

Loading...

<<<

Getting AI to Work in Complex Codebases

Trey Causey

The techniques I want to talk about and that we’ve adopted in the last few months fall under what I call “frequent intentional compaction”. Essentially, this means designing your ENTIRE WORKFLOW around context management, and keeping utilization in the 40%-60% range (depends on complexity of the problem ).

Dex Horthy, founder of HumanLayer, produces an outstanding guide to getting the results you want from AI when working with large, complex codebases. It's grounded, reasonable, and eminently actionable with loads of diagrams and examples.

(Perhaps unsurprisingly) Context is king. Managing your context intentionally and carefully and meticulously is the path to great results. Horthy uses a research - plan - implement pattern that focuses on making sure each step is providing the subsequent step with only the exact context that is needed to be successful.

It’s really thoughtfully written, I recommend it to everyone, but especially to engineers who have decided that AI isn’t helpful for them.

See also this short context engineering template from Eric Zakariasson that arrives at similar conclusions.

Subscribe for new posts

Blog posts only. No commonplace entries. Never sold or shared.