Culture Eats Strategy

Culture Eats Strategy (For Breakfast) says no matter how good your strategy is, the culture of your team isn’t capable of executing it. If your problem is execution, look to change the culture instead of trying to come up with increasingly elaborate strategies.

By default, your LLM lives in a certain part of the “latent space”: when you ask it to generate code, it will generate it with a style that is based off of how it was fine tuned, as well as its context window up until the point (this includes the system prompt as well as any files it’s read into the context.) This style is self-reinforcing: if a lot of the text in the context window that uses a library, the LLM will continue to use that library–conversely, if the library is not mentioned at all and the LLM is not fine-tuned to reach for it by default, it will not use it (there are exceptions, but this is a reasonably good description of how Sonnet 3.7 will behave.)

If the LLM is consistently doing things you don’t like, you need to change its culture: you need to put it in a different part of the latent space. This could be adding a rule to your Cursor rules (modifying the prompt), but it can also be refactoring existing code to follow the style you want the LLM to follow, since LLMs are trained to predict the next token in context. The fine-tune, the prompt and the codebase are the culture. One you can’t change, and the codebase is a lot bigger than the prompt and ultimately will have a dominating effect.

Examples

• Sonnet 3.7’s house style is to prefer synchronous over asynchronous Python. To get it to reliably write new code using async, it was necessary to force it to port most of the existing code in my codebase to be async.