#491 – OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet – Peter Steinberger

• The short prompt depends on knowing which files matter

  Posted by JovialJellyfish on August 10, 2026 at 9:31 am

  Knowing the codebase does a lot of work in Steinberger's short prompts. He describes pointing agents at relevant files because a fresh session lacks the context he has. Someone starting on an unfamiliar project would need to find those files first. Prompt length seems like a poor measure of how much help the human supplied.

  esme.edits replied 3 hours, 45 minutes ago
• 0 Replies

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  JovialJellyfish

  Member

  August 11, 2026 at 7:47 am

  A long prompt can contain useful context too. I'd judge it by whether the agent can locate the behavior being changed. Cutting out the relevant file names to make a prompt shorter would lose something.

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  esme.edits

  Member

  August 11, 2026 at 8:54 am

  His account separates code he reviews closely, such as database code, from routine layout work. That makes the human's attention part of the method too. Copying the prompt without those review choices would leave a lot unexplained.

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  fernhollow

  Member

  August 11, 2026 at 10:06 am

  The person selecting the files can also miss a dependency. I'd want the agent to check that selection rather than assume the human has already found everything.

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