A year of vibes

Re:A year of vibes by vunderba on Monday December 22, 2025 @11:12AM (#46355319)

When I find myself in a situation where I’ve been hammering an LLM and it keeps veering down unproductive paths - trying poor solutions or applying fixes that make no difference but eventually we do arrive at the correct answer, the result is often a massive 100+ KB running context.

To help mitigate this in the future I'll often prompt:

  “Why did it take so long to arrive at the solution? What did you do wrong?”

Then I follow up with:

  “In a single paragraph, describe the category of problem and a recommended approach for diagnosing and solving it in the future.”

I then add this summary to either the relevant MD file (CHANGING_CSS_LAYOUTS.md, DATA_PERSISTENCE.md, etc) or more generally to the DISCOVERIES.md file, which is linked from my CLAUDE.md under:

  - When resolving challenging directives, refresh yourself with: docs/DISCOVERIES.md - it contains useful lessons learned and discoveries made during development.

I don't think linking to an entire commit full of errors/failures is necessarily a good idea - feels like it would quickly lead to the proverbial poisoning of the well.

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Re:A year of vibes by johnsmith1840 on Monday December 22, 2025 @11:38AM (#46355630)

When you get stuck in a loop it's best to remove all code back to a point it didn't have problems. If you continue debugging in that hammering failure loop you get TONS of random future bugs.

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Re:A year of vibes by anamexis on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:54PM (#46356609)

I've had good luck doing something like this first (but more specific to the issue at hand):

We are getting stuck in an unproductive loop. I am going to discard all of this work and start over from scratch. Write a prompt for a new coding assistant to accomplish this task, noting what pitfalls to avoid.

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Re:A year of vibes by itsgrimetime on Monday December 22, 2025 @02:27PM (#46357848)

Yep - this has worked well for me too. I do it a little differently:

I have a /review-sessions command & a "parse-sessions" skill that tells Claude how to parse the session logs from ~/.claude/projects/, then it classifies the issues and proposes new skills, changes to CLAUDE.md, etc. based on what common issues it saw.

I've tried something similar to DISCOVERIES.md (a structured "knowledge base" of assumptions that were proven wrong, things that were tried, etc.) but haven't had luck keeping this from getting filled with obvious things (that the code itself describes) or slightly-incorrect things, or just too large in general.

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Re:A year of vibes by vunderba on Monday December 22, 2025 @03:43PM (#46358807)

100%. I like the idea of turning it into a SKILL.

I do have to perform more manual adjustments/consolidation to the final postmortem before placing it in the discoveries md file, because as you pointed out LLMs tend to be exceptionally verbose.

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