# Looking for custom instructions / settings for coding agents

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/looking-for-custom-instructions-settings-for-coding-agents/131471>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** agents, ai, llm\
**Created:** [August 8, 2025, 10:00am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/looking-for-custom-instructions-settings-for-coding-agents/131471 "2025-08-08T10:00:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![njacki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e8c25b/32.png) [@njacki](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/njacki)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2025, 10:00am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/looking-for-custom-instructions-settings-for-coding-agents/131471/1 "2025-08-08T10:00:06Z")

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Hi everyone,

I recently did give a try to a coding agent, seeing the fuzz about it everywhere finally convinced me to click on it. I briefly tested it for scientific code translation from Fortran but already face some issues:

- It does well on very simple tasks, but it often makes many small, stupid mistakes (such as stopping working in the middle of a function, a in the next step, erase everything…)
- One annoying behaviour: it runs Julia with commands like  
`julia --project -e "some code here"`  
and that creates shell issues for me (namely because of the `!` in some function names). The agent often does not accept that the code is actually correct.
- Sometimes it kills the Julia process before the program finishes and then concludes the code is wrong.
- Right now I use the basic GitHub Copilot-(pro/teaching version) agent in VSCode (using Claude Sonnet 4). That combo seemed to handle Julia better for me than GPT-4, but I have not modified any agent settings (I am not really an AI guy, and don’t know all the _tricks_…)

I know you can give custom instructions to these agents, but I could not find a thread where people share their setups (hope this is not a duplicate).

Could you share:

- Your experience with coding agents, especially in the context of Julia code ofc (good and bad)?
- Your custom instructions, prompts, or agent settings that help with Julia development?
- Any practical tips to avoid the problems above (shell runs, premature killing, false negatives)?

Thanks !