At work, the monorepo is enormous and files are loaded on-demand as needed. This isn't uncommon with huge repos - Microsoft have VFS for Git (although I hear that's deprecated now), Meta have EdenFS, and Google has some proprietary solution.

We have a hook that blocks find and grep because they can be extremely slow, and tells it to instead use some significantly faster MCP tools to search the codebase, powered by a search index with local changes overlaid.

GPT-5.5 has no problem with this. Claude Opus mostly does it, but sometimes it loves to find workarounds rather than following the instructions. Things like: Try alternative commands like egrep. Create a symlink to grep and run that to see if it bypasses the filtering. Run it with a different shell like zsh. Write a Python script that execs grep. Write a Python script to reimplement grep.

I'm trying Hermes Agent at home, but I have it in its own VM with restricted permissions.

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I never used Claude, but that's basically my sentiment about copilot when compared to Gemini.

Then I forbid all this BS in agents file. Gemini follows it. Copilot ignores it with all its strength. Then I tell it to stop trying on the chat prompt. 2 minutes later it does it again.

Not just at prompt engineering level, but at all levels, Gemini guardrails are better ( well it was, they killed it and replaced with anti gravity now).

[–] dan@upvote.au 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

You need to use hooks to actually block it from doing things. CLAUDE.md files are just guidance, and it's not guaranteed to follow everything (and the longer the file gets, the more likely it'll ignore stuff - it should be kept as short as possible)

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks

Hooks are code that runs at a certain point (eg after you submit a prompt, before a tool call, after a turn, etc) that can do some validation, verification, logging, etc.

It does still try to work around the blocks though, but it's not as bad as trying to put the restrictions in the prompt.

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Yep but the granularity of copilot is "allow once" vs "allow forever". Gemini is much better: besides also having "allow for this session" it never tries to run python scripts it writes on the spot or command lines that are 4 lines long. And doesn't double down when I say I won't allow python at all.

My setup shares the same agents and skills files for both cli tools.

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