Tip: Have Agents Clone a Reference Repo Into /tmp — Not Your Working Dir
Simon Willison·medium signal
From Simon Willison's Agentic Engineering Patterns: pointing a coding agent at an existing codebase as a style reference is a high-leverage shortcut — 'use another codebase as reference' communicates complex conventions with minimal prompt tokens. The key detail is cloning the reference into /tmp rather than inside your project, so the agent can't accidentally commit reference code; Willison made this explicit after observing it as a common failure mode.