My personal experience is that it’s worthwhile to put instructions, user-manual style, into the context. These are things like:
- How to build.
- How to run tests.
- How to work around the incredible crappiness of the codex-rs sandbox.
I also like to put in basic style-guide things like “the minimum Python version is 3.12.” Sadly I seem to also need “if you find yourself writing TypeVar, think again” because (unscientifically) it seems that putting the actual keyword that the agent should try not to use makes it more likely to remember the instructions.
- How to build.
- How to run tests.
- How to work around the incredible crappiness of the codex-rs sandbox.
I also like to put in basic style-guide things like “the minimum Python version is 3.12.” Sadly I seem to also need “if you find yourself writing TypeVar, think again” because (unscientifically) it seems that putting the actual keyword that the agent should try not to use makes it more likely to remember the instructions.