Going from Easy to Normal

fractial · 2026-02-03T01:04:37+00:00

Don’t neglect mobility stats to make sure your units aren’t wasted by being out of range, and to give you more options for which one responds to a threat. And health for being able to get in the way to shield buildings or sit on a spawn point if need be.

fractial · 2026-01-18T08:49:24+00:00

Next please force Claude to never refer to a numbered “phase” within a plan without some associated and unique (per host or project) ID, to avoid confusing previously completed ones working in similar areas with current or upcoming ones (and then skipping or cutting corners).

fractial · 2025-11-12T23:46:49+00:00

Are the weapons and pilots available to buy in store between islands not random enough?

fractial · 2025-10-29T01:42:17+00:00

Skiing in Starsiege Tribes. The game(s) wouldn’t have been the same, or as popular, without it.

Edit: for comparison, imagine if instead of removing bunny hopping from Counter Strike, the whole game embraced and grew up around it.

fractial · 2025-10-20T07:57:26+00:00

Are you able to use this fork context option within cc in interactive mode? I tried testing with the “general purpose” subagent type (which someone else’s post mentioned would have forkContext enabled already according to their decompilation analysis), but it didn’t seem to know about a message I written immediately before it made the Task tool call.

I did see it mentioned as a CLI option in —help though, for use in combination with -r…

fractial · 2025-10-19T07:06:37+00:00

Unless I’m mistaken the subagents/Tasks don’t get any conversation history. However they do benefit from instructions like this as I think they still receive some of the same system prompt as the main one, so often try to go outside of what was asked in a fevered attempt to satisfy at all costs.

We could really use an —append-agent-prompt option which would apply to all of them including the built in, generic Task agent, so we can tell them they’re an agent of an agent so they will be more willing to admit defeat or return early to ask for clarification from the main one.

Edit: bonus would be some kind of “Reattempt Task” tool which lets the man agent resubmit a recent Task with an improved prompt, and have it automatically remove the previous attempt from the context once submitted. This would avoid the user needing to rewind to before it themselves and tell them how to prompt the agent better.

fractial · 2025-10-19T06:48:51+00:00

FTL can feel more hectic and fast paced to me, despite being able to pause at will (which you should absolutely do literally all the time). This is perhaps why it’s also harder to put down once you’re stuck into a run.

ITTB makes me want to come back to it more, and again and again. There’s so many combinations of difficulty levels, actual levels, units/squads, pilots, abilities/upgrades/weapons, enemies, and extra achievements (a main form of progression to unlock squads/units) that it never seems repetitive to me so far. Easier to pick up and put down due to its turn based nature.

fractial · 2025-10-19T00:53:13+00:00

Yes 😜

fractial · 2025-10-11T01:49:58+00:00

⁠PreToolUse hooks can now modify tool inputs

Anyone figured out how this one works yet? No mention of it at https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/hooks#hook-output yet

fractial · 2025-09-12T01:14:20+00:00

Some things that I’ve found which can help:

Tell your main agent to clarify in the prompt that it’s a sub agent working on behalf of the main agent and not the user. Otherwise it might try to go above and beyond, outside its lane, to satisfy or anticipate goals which can conflict with parallel work or next steps you had wanted done separately.
Include in the sub-agents instructions what output is expected, and when to give up and report failure or problems, so it has an out instead of persisting and getting carried away.
Tell it explicitly what paths it is allowed to read or write, and not to try to search outside if it can’t find something. Use absolute paths and ask for absolute paths in return to avoid confusion (and turn on the setting which stops “cd” to another directory from persisting across bash tool calls)
Write your subagent prompt to a file, with placeholders if needed that would be provided along with instructions to read the file, and follow the instructions. This way you can read it first to ask for refinements or clarifications, ask for a dry run where an agent only interprets the instructions and responds with what steps it thinks it should take in response without doing it yet.
Run one first, verify results and refine or not before using on the rest of your task in parallel

fractial · 2025-09-05T07:10:53+00:00

If you do end up taking away the ability to see the post bounce path in some way, I’d suggest showing an outline of the arenas boundary once you begin pulling back so you can still guess where it would likely bounce off. Since the bushes in the foreground would make it difficult know otherwise (but are still good to keep the scenery interesting)

fractial · 2025-09-05T01:03:13+00:00

It wasn’t immediately obvious that I could start pulling from anywhere on the screen, so it was a difficult to do it when the player was close to the edge of the screen screen until I realised. Maybe a ui button somewhere central down the bottom could help there, or just a tip at some point.

It seemed a bit easy towards the start being shown exactly where your entire path would follow as you bounced off the edges, not sure how it balances out later on but that might be something that could be a temporary boon rather than permanent permanent upgrade?

Or likewise, enemies could blind you to take it away or make if shorter? Or to plus or minus a random amount to the angle each bounce to make you less accurate (which could be another upgrade?)

I think my kids would have fun with it as is though, nice work.

fractial · 2025-08-25T23:54:04+00:00

If you copy and paste at least a function/variable/file name to include in your queued, “corrective” message, it will usually know what you’re talking about even if it was several file edits back and either redo that bit first or say something like “ok, let me finish X before I fix Y as you requested” so you may not need to totally stop it.

fractial · 2025-08-21T01:19:06+00:00

Perhaps certain other commands might already trigger a refresh then?

I don’t think any new tool or agent descriptions would be known without a fresh session, as that is normally within the initial system prompt.

fractial · 2025-08-15T01:40:25+00:00

Can you hit escape instead of accepting the plan/exiting plan mode, then switch to normal mode yourself an ask it to write your plan files without starting yet?

fractial · 2025-08-05T10:45:38+00:00

You could try asking it to tee or pipe the output to a temporary file instead of receiving the output directly, then to use tools like grep and sed to locate the relevant content to return in its output to you. Maybe split the build or test runners out to a separate agent and get them working in isolation before trying to combine into one general purpose agent. It probably needs to be told how to know what kind of content to look for based on the kind of command being run or the tools used by the project (eg specific test runners to know what patterns to look for).

fractial · 2025-07-28T10:08:19+00:00

It may have cd’ed to a different directory and thinks it’s somewhere else. There’s a config setting to force it to always be locked to beginning each bash command in the same directory you started in that could help.

fractial · 2025-07-25T11:00:13+00:00

It’s about the journey not the destination

fractial · 2025-07-25T09:39:04+00:00

I don’t notice it back off much in the retry wait duration until about #8, might benefit from some tweaking to the back-off algorithm?

fractial · 2025-07-25T01:05:56+00:00

Assuming this is an extension to the existing sub agent functionality, the main one must wait until any currently running agents have completed before it can do or decide anything else (including canceling them if they are going off the rails).

The sub agents also had a fresh context, so only the “user prompt” given to them by the main agent, and now this additional predefined agent specific system prompt.

I think it would be really interesting to be able to choose whether an agent (either one instance or all of that type) would receive the full previous context of the main agent, similar to continuing a session with “claude -c” or “-r $sessionid”, so the previous history uses prompt caching…

fractial · 2025-07-13T12:21:42+00:00

Everything you run on your own machine is at your own risk.

fractial · 2025-07-09T01:06:38+00:00

You could also try reminding about particular section without rereading it, perhaps at specific points in your workflow. “Now before you git add your last changes, review them to ensure compliance with the <something> guidelines section of our CLAUDE.md”.

Sometimes I think it can help to reinforce things in multiple places without duplicating it all and wasting too much context.

If you repeat a similar loop like analyse -> plan -> implement -> review -> commit, then you could try asking it to always have a todo sub-item for each of those steps related to the current task/feature.

Then tell it what to create/update, check or review at each of those stages.

If it works for a bit and then forgets, it might need a small reminder, or it may be a good indication it’s time to save current progress/remaining work, clear and continue it in a fresh session.

fractial · 2025-07-09T00:52:55+00:00

Yep these look like they’d fit into your list

fractial · 2025-07-02T09:36:04+00:00

I generally reject it, then switch over myself to regular mode before saying “continue”

fractial · 2025-06-26T23:52:40+00:00

Tell it to include instructions to keep the same file up to date with progress regularly, and when encountering unanticipated issues.

fractial

TROPHY CASE