danhopwood.com

Length rules don't fix verbose agent replies. Changing the definition of a reply does – to the Slack message a colleague would send after doing the work. The full instruction file, free to copy.

An output style fixes Claude's grating default voice in five minutes. Or go further: run a custom agent as the main agent and replace Claude's persona entirely.

It took four builds of the same site to get here. The fourth runs on a reference doc (a contract for every component) and each new page now comes out about 95% right in a single pass.

Six investments turn agents into a software factory. The order you make them in decides whether you get 10x the output or 10x the waste.

Boris Cherny says his job now is writing loops, not prompts. There's a Claude Code command called /loop – assuming that's what he means is the mistake. It's level one of five.