Skip to content
View original post on X: laurenX· 36/100AI score36/100

Lauren Tan's pstack distills engineering practices into short agent principles

AISummary

Lauren Tan says pstack's engineering principles are among its most durable parts, each a concise skill of about 10-20 lines, and expects many to compress into short principles or workflows as models improve.

Her /poteto-mode index asks agents to name each principle that shaped a decision, which is why responses often end with a Principles Named or Used section.

Many principles came from her sessions correcting agents this year, and each can also be invoked as a skill via /principle-<name>.

Post on XView on X
laurenVerified on X
@poteto

perhaps one of the most durable parts of pstack are its engineering principles: very concise skills (~10-20 loc) that distill down good practices into its core.

as models get smarter, i expect most of pstack skills to compress into short principles or workflows (a generic list of steps) and that i will be able to delete a few of them.

how it works is that /poteto-mode contains a short index of available principles and tells agents "In your reply, name each principle that shaped a decision and the specific choice it changed." this is why you'll often see a Principles Named or Used section at the end of the agent's response

many of these principles were extracted from my sessions correcting agents since the start of this year. some are inspired by problems i see people talk about, like Attack the Premise, inspired by @VictorTaelin's post https://x.com/VictorTaelin/status/2096273196412498057

you can also use the principles as skills if you want greater control, by invoking /principle-<name>

https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack/docs/guide/08-principles.md

Uncle Bob Martin@unclebobmartin
I'm a newcomer to @poteto's plist; But it seems to me that there is some very significant wisdom encoded in there. I suspect you could teach a master class on the principles.
View quoted post on X

Source: lauren · x.comPublished · added here