I've had to explicitly direct the machine to read existing sibling code and follow the specific idioms and patterns in use.
Not sure! I mean, look at this sibling comment for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062797. Not my experience, but apparently others have this experience.
> But what if a coding agent was prompted to be more curious during development?
I've tried using the language of curiosity. My qualitative take was that it did have a positive impact, but not much. And I can only tinker with system prompting so much, before I get drawn into LLM driving :)
> which is that everyone's style of work is going to converge
yeah I imagine even people's styles of thinking will converge as a result of this, more so than from reading other people's prose or programs. I think I saw something on HN to this effect within the last month, too.
But what if a coding agent was prompted to be more curious during development? Like a human developer, make mental notes of alternatives to try out and chase suspicious looking code which may seem unrelated to the task at hand. It could even spawn rabbit hole agents in parallel.
Taking a step back, this probably highlights major hazard with the increased usage of LLMs for coding, which is that everyone's style of work is going to converge because most code will be written by the 2-3 most popular models using the same system prompts.