The "read before editing" rule seems too broad

[cmeerw]

Description

coder.md.tpl has a critical rule to "READ BEFORE EDITING"

I think that should be narrowed to something like "READ THE CONTEXT BEFORE EDITING". In it's current form it will likely result in the full file being read before applying (potentially small edits in a large file). Just did a small test with a sample lorem.txt file (around 140 kB) and the prompt:

In lorem.txt, put quotes around all occurrences of "vitae sociosqu"

Ideally, that should result in a grep and then 2 small edits, but at the moment the whole file is being read first, needlessly wasting lots of tokens (likely because of the above mentioned critical rule).

This is somewhat related to #2784, also another reason to want #2677

Version

v0.66.1

Environment

NetBSD / DeepSeek V4 Flash

[cmeerw]

Managed to build from source now to test some changes. It seems we should also have something like:

15. LIMIT FILE READS: Avoid reading whole files as they could be large, instead read just the sections of a file that you need.

in the critical rules section to avoid large file reads.

[DanEble]

This is somewhat related to #2784

Which is a dupe of #2756.

[AbGhost-cyber]

it wastes tokens, i asked it to work on a simple task it made the agent spend about 30m thinking and no output

[cmeerw]

I guess the default limit of the View tool should be reduced significantly (the current 2000 lines seems excessive)

[taciturnaxolotl]

yeah thats a good idea