← All IntelClip / AI AgentsA taste section, and why complexity rules only pay off in hindsight
From I made Claude smarter by writing it a letter · ≈36:55
“Complexity belongs at the adapter boundary. Orchestration stays pure. UI stays dumb. Inferred types over annotations. Any is the enemy.”
Theo
“The harsh reality is that you don't notice complexity that isn't necessary until it crosses a certain threshold.”
Theo
“security is important but should not be overindexed on especially for dev mode and maintainer only features”
Theo
“Do C plus D plus A. File and babysit. That is my whole prompt. That prompt will do everything I want the way I want it to.”
Theo
“It's been so nice to have everything I do just be more like what I want and my prompts have gotten way smaller as a result.”
Theo
What’s in it
- Architectural taste compressed into memorable lines the agent applies by default, plus the honest observation that you only notice unnecessary complexity after it crosses a threshold — so you encode the causes once you find them.
Clip transcript
code lives probably isn't that necessary anymore, but it's so little whatever it's fine. A little taste section about where we want things to live. Complexity belongs at the adapter boundary. Orchestration stays pure. UI stays dumb. Inferred types over annotations. Any is the enemy. Yep. Comments describe how a thing is used and move with when the code moves to be used mostly to describe functions not to annotate every line of behavior. Our users drive agents all day and notice drop frames, lying spinners, and stale labels. No continuously repainted animations. They peg the GPU. For real here fights the task in front of you. Say so loudly and get a human sign off before breaking it. One last one is I noticed that the dev servers were being spun up and worked on with way too much security for something that only affects your local network and tail net. So I yelled at it for that and said security is important but should not be overindexed on especially for dev mode and maintainer only features. Another one of those additions that seems small but has actually been life-changing for a lot of this work. The harsh reality is that you don't notice complexity that isn't necessary until it crosses a certain threshold. So the problem I had is that stuff was getting unnecessarily complex. I only noticed when it was too far, but then I took all of the things that caused that. I put them here and now everything is less complex, which has been awesome. It's been so nice to have everything I do just be more like what I want and my prompts have gotten way smaller as a result. Here's a real example. I have to add the iOS and Android apps for T3 code to the marketing site. We are working on a marketing site overhaul, but I want these ASAP. So, we're going to get them right now. I asked it to make these changes. It decided that it wanted to give me a mock for all the different options using one of those two skills I'll show you in a minute. And it created these mocks. A is marketing hero with the also on your phone call out. B marketing final call to action. C download page. D marketing footer. I hate most of these. It wants C plus D plus A together. Do C plus D plus A. File and babysit. That is my whole prompt. That prompt will do everything I want the way I want it to. The C plusd plus A it knows because that's the context it gave me using my HTML skill and file in PR tells it use these skills to figure out the rest that I want. Here's one I did yesterday that I forgot to make a PR for where I'm trying to fix the remote upgrade path to just have better UI. File in PR and now that will be filed and I'll probably go merge it after I'm done recording. So, I just noticed a bug literally now where I had a slept thread that woke because I snoozed it and it unneooed, but I wanted to settle it and the settle button wasn't working on a thread that had just woken up. So, I described the bug. I had a woke thread that I wanted to settle and I was unable. The settle button that appeared on hover would not work. Rightclick settle did. Diagnose and fix file and babysit. That is everything I need and I will have a PR that is probably ready to merge in the next 15 or so minutes. That's pretty [ __ ] cool. I know it's silly, but this has
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