In general, as LLMs get smarter, “less is more” becomes increasingly true. You’re polluting their context with dozens or hundreds of instructions, all of which the LLM tries to satisfy. However,

    You don’t need documentation […or…] memory

…oh heck no. Easy to miss at Claude and Codex’s default detail level but if you read your actual session transcripts, you are almost certain to notice the LLM solving lots and lots of the same little problems over and over again.

    The code IS the documentation

First, lots of things cannot be learned from the code.

Trivial example: LLMs struggled with QA on our app. They didn’t know how to find the seeded test accounts. They would create new ones and do it wrong, or find the seeded test accounts but not know their passwords because they were encrypted, so they’d change the passwords but not tell the other agents. Shitloads of tokens burned. It was a no-brainer to just give them the credentials in a skill that gets loaded when they do QA.

You could say that’s an environment issue, not a code issue. But as far as actual code IME at a minimum we have to tell the agents our general repo structure and architecture patterns.

The days of “you are the world’s greatest Python programmer, write good code” or whatever are over (if that style of prompting even worked in the first place) and as I said less is more. But, still….