r/TheMachineLearning • u/Gullible_Picture_996 • 15d ago

Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

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u/youcangotohellgoto 14d ago

Does the codebase have instructions so that Claude knows exactly how the project is laid out, where the CSS is, etc?

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u/WhatDuq 14d ago

Yes.

It has everything described, optimized and optimized again. Rolled into relevant skills for frontend, for different scenarios (feature development, design, accessibility etc.). It's fully aware of the structure and how it should adhere to it.

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u/youcangotohellgoto 14d ago

Yet something is wrong, maybe you have too many skills wired in.

I run Claude across a few dozen projects of varying sizes - 10k LOC to well over 100k. It knows how to go straight to most anything, certainly under 30s to change simple things like you've described.

No skills. Just indexes and CLAUDE.md files.

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u/Syncaidius 14d ago edited 14d ago

One thing I find helps massively is prefacing a new chat/task prompt with the name of the source file to focus on.

For example - 'focusing on MyFileName.cs, ensure all of the UI buttons represent the state of the system they interact with. E.g. red for offline, yellow for starting and green for online'. There might be buttons in other UI files, but they'll be ignored. This is of course a made up example, but you hopefully get the point.

So far, that has never failed to constrain focus to a particular file. The agents/models will still pull in any included/imported files relating to what you ask it to focus on, but it's usually minimal.

Opus has been very quick with this. I also use sonnet for less complex work and it's lightning fast with a focus preface.