Sergey Grankin sgrankin

Critical Analysis: Claude Code System Prompt

An engineering review of the Claude Code system prompt against prompt engineering best practices, Anthropic's own published research, and structural quality heuristics.

Methodology: Analysis grounded in Anthropic's prompt engineering docs, context engineering guide, tool design guide, the "Lost in the Middle" phenomenon (Liu et al., 2024), and the QA heuristics framework (SOLID/complexity/security applied to prompt architecture).

Executive Summary

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

Verification-Driven Development (VDD)

Methodology: Iterative Adversarial Refinement

Overview

Verification-Driven Development (VDD) is a high-integrity software engineering framework designed to eliminate "code slop" and logic gaps through a generative adversarial loop. Unlike traditional development cycles that rely on passive code reviews, VDD utilizes a specialized multi-model orchestration where a Builder AI and an Adversarial AI are placed in a high-friction feedback loop, mediated by a human developer and a granular tracking system.

I. The VDD Toolchain

Install

Run a nix container with podman, with the container destination mounted as /mnt:

DEST=~/containers/nixos
mkdir -p $DEST/{dev,proc,etc/nixos}

podman run -v $DEST:/mnt -it --rm --cap-add SYS_ADMIN docker.io/nixos/nix:latest

	" Based on comment by mchlstckl
	" https://www.reddit.com/r/HelixEditor/comments/14aqztf/comment/jocslxs/
	" Check the history of this gist for a changelist

	" Read NOTES and WARNINGS lower


	" Must be done first to tell other plugins that <space> is the leader key
	let mapleader=" "

	(ns webdav
	(:require [clojure.string :as str]
	[clojure.data.xml :as xml]
	[org.httpkit.server :as hk-server]))

	;; add the XML namespace that we'll use later
	(xml/alias-uri 'd "DAV:")

	(defn dissoc-in
	"Should be in the standard library..."

	<form>
	<div class="svgContainer">
	<div>
	<svg class="mySVG" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" viewBox="0 0 200 200">
	<defs>
	<circle id="armMaskPath" cx="100" cy="100" r="100"/>
	</defs>
	<clipPath id="armMask">
	<use xlink:href="#armMaskPath" overflow="visible"/>
	</clipPath>

	CREATE TABLE _SqliteDatabaseProperties (key TEXT, value TEXT, UNIQUE(key));
	CREATE TABLE deleted_messages (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT UNIQUE, guid TEXT NOT NULL);
	CREATE TABLE sqlite_sequence(name,seq);
	CREATE TABLE chat_handle_join (chat_id INTEGER REFERENCES chat (ROWID) ON DELETE CASCADE, handle_id INTEGER REFERENCES handle (ROWID) ON DELETE CASCADE, UNIQUE(chat_id, handle_id));
	CREATE TABLE sync_deleted_messages (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT UNIQUE, guid TEXT NOT NULL, recordID TEXT );
	CREATE TABLE message_processing_task (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT UNIQUE, guid TEXT NOT NULL, task_flags INTEGER NOT NULL );
	CREATE TABLE handle (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT UNIQUE, id TEXT NOT NULL, country TEXT, service TEXT NOT NULL, uncanonicalized_id TEXT, person_centric_id TEXT, UNIQUE (id, service) );
	CREATE TABLE sync_deleted_chats (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT UNIQUE, guid TEXT NOT NULL, recordID TEXT,timestamp INTEGER);
	CREATE TABLE message_attachment_join

	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <string.h>
	#include <assert.h>
	FILE in; long M[1<<24]={0}, D, *R, H=0x130000, IP=0, T;
	long getu() { long t, h = getc(in); if (h < 0xC0) return h;
	t = ((h&0x1F) << 6) \| (getc(in) & 0x3F); if (h < 0xE0) return t;
	t = ( t << 6) \| (getc(in) & 0x3F); if (h < 0xF0) return t;
	t = ( t << 6) \| (getc(in) & 0x3F); return t & 0x1FFFFF; }
	void putu(long c) { if (c < 0x80) { putchar(c); return; }
	if (c < 0x7FF) { putchar(0xC0\|(c>>6)); } else {

	/*
	STRINGS
	*/
	Assert.Equal(expectedString, actualString);
	Assert.StartsWith(expectedString, stringToCheck);
	Assert.EndsWith(expectedString, stringToCheck);

	// Some can also take optional params
	Assert.Equal(expectedString, actualString, ignoreCase: true);
	Assert.StartsWith(expectedString, stringToCheck, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);