The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.
All of these harnesses should support pinning config files and tools to specific models or families of models.
It's really tiring to have to tweak everything with each model release and then watch those changes mess up cheaper models in the process.
Yeah or config older than x days...
There’s really not much to specialize in and differentiate yourself. All this harness customization is fleeting. Remember prompt engineering?
Steering/corrective instructions are now supposed to go into memories - which are non-portable? How do we manage these documents for team members without everyone repeating themselves? And if you remove all these documents, how do you work with other models which might use them (nevermind that claude ignored AGENTS.md for the longest time).
I am on board with not putting stuff like "write clean code" into an agent file, or using plugins for tools that are now built into the harness. I don't see enough evidence to support models being significantly better at figuring out intent, or getting the assumption correct. I've always gotten better results (as ever) with very constrained instructions, vs "fix the install".
> Steering/corrective instructions are now supposed to go into memories - which are non-portable?
I’m sure this just intended to steer you to vendor lock-in. Remember, these are the same people who are so insecure/petty about their product that they won’t make it recognize the .agents/AGENTS.md standard.
That is the interesting part to me. Also, was anyone else familiar with the LLM-app terms "ablation" and "product overhang," prior to this? I was not.
If you were, please share the knowledge with us. Where can I learn more?
Yup. That's pretty much the most interesting part.
> because the new models can surprise you.
Yes, they keep surprising me that they still keep doing all of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962703 with no improvement despite all the marketing assurances that "hey you don't need to read code anymore"
Yeah, I'm going over a bunch of components a frontier model generated and while they "work" the code is quite shocking and will create significant maintenance burden. Not to mention they don't use any of our shared utilities and duplicate so much code.
Even for older models I was (and am) of the opinion that a lot of the context-overstuffing cruft people have been wrapping around their LLM usage is more of an RNG-impacting (but not always for the better) lucky charm rather than it being universally helpful.
And a lot of people latched on to it as a form of self-soothing.
"I may not write much code anymore, but I can still be an expert prompt engineer!"
Not really. The big change in newer models is the amount of RL relative to pretraining. RL makes the models stable by collapsing distributions around desired outcomes. The old tweaks like giving the agent a role ("You are an expert XYZ engineer") or stuffing the context with engineering idioms have effectively been RL'd into negligence, but they still waste tokens.
You can see this visually in older image generation models. Stable Diffusion 1.5 would produce wildly different images based on slight variations in prompt and seed, but the latest image gen models are nearly seed indifferent and can tolerate a decent amount of prompt tweaking while staying "consistent"
> is more of an RNG-impacting (but not always for the better) lucky charm rather than it being universally helpful.
I wrote this last year, it's still true:
--- start quote ---
https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
In reality these are just shamanic rituals with outcomes based on faith, fear, or excitement. Engineering it is not.
--- end quote ---
There are some prompts useful for the user like brainstorming [1] but on the whole it's nothing but lucky charms
[1] brainstorming from superpowers: https://github.com/obra/superpowers
CHANGELOG: surprise me
Salesman "recommends" you to continue wasting more tokens and on top of that, he "recommends" you to use only recursive loops with the latest and greatest models.
Finally he also "recommends" that you do not look at the code, or even understand it.
His "recommendations" are designed to get you to spend even more tokens and get you hooked on the Opus / Fable slot machine in order to extract as much money as possible from your wallets.
News at 10.
I was using Opus 4.6 until 2 days ago with no CLAUDE.md or anything and it was great.
Tried out Opus 5 and it's been a super annoying experience out of the box.