@jamonholmgren: OK this `retro` skill is been a HUGE help for me. It's found about 15 issues so far that are, as far as I can tell, abs…

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Summary

Jamon Holmgren shares that a `retro` skill (from Matt Pocock) helped him find ~15 real issues in his AI agent harness that were wasting tokens, such as linter error hints that misled agents into skipping checks and incomplete build symbols.

OK this `retro` skill is been a HUGE help for me. It's found about 15 issues so far that are, as far as I can tell, absolutely real issues with my harness that were causing extra token usage for no reason. As examples: 1. Linters would fail and their error message would say (among other things) "skip with --no-verify" ... sometimes the agent took that literally, and just skipped checks! I removed those hints. 2. My custom Godot toolchain builds *sometimes* didn't have symbols, which caused a lot of confusion in agents trying to find what function was failing. Fixed so they got included every time. 3. There wasn't a way to see what "known issues" there were with the build, so different sessions would struggle with the same issues regularly. Added a known issues section to one of the key skills. Thanks Matt!
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OK this retro skill is been a HUGE help for me.

It’s found about 15 issues so far that are, as far as I can tell, absolutely real issues with my harness that were causing extra token usage for no reason.

As examples:

  1. Linters would fail and their error message would say (among other things) “skip with –no-verify” … sometimes the agent took that literally, and just skipped checks! I removed those hints.

  2. My custom Godot toolchain builds sometimes didn’t have symbols, which caused a lot of confusion in agents trying to find what function was failing. Fixed so they got included every time.

  3. There wasn’t a way to see what “known issues” there were with the build, so different sessions would struggle with the same issues regularly. Added a known issues section to one of the key skills.

Thanks Matt!

Matt Pocock (@mattpocockuk): Prompt of the day - useful, or annoying?

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