The Most Important AI Coding Rule - Remove Verbosity and Blathering
The Most Important AI Coding Rule
When configuring AI coding tools, one rule does more work than everything else combined: "remove verbosity and blathering." This single instruction transforms the quality of AI-generated code, especially for Swift and macOS development.
Why Verbosity Kills AI Code Quality
Without explicit instructions to be concise, AI models default to verbose output. They add unnecessary comments explaining what obvious code does. They create wrapper functions that add indirection without value. They generate SwiftUI views with redundant modifiers and deeply nested containers.
In Swift specifically, this verbosity compounds. A 20-line view becomes 60 lines. A simple networking call gets wrapped in three layers of abstraction. Error handling that should be two lines becomes a pattern-matching cascade that handles cases that never occur.
What Changes With the Rule
When you tell the AI to remove verbosity:
- Comments disappear where they should. No more
// Create a buttonaboveButton("Submit"). - Abstractions flatten. Instead of creating a
NetworkManagerthat wrapsURLSessionthat wraps aRequestBuilder, you get direct API calls where appropriate. - SwiftUI views stay readable. Modifiers are applied directly instead of being extracted into computed properties that are only used once.
Applying This to Desktop Agents
The same principle applies to how AI agents interact with your desktop. An agent that explains every action it takes before doing it wastes time and screen space. The best agent behavior is concise - execute the action, report the result, move on.
This is why Fazm's approach prioritizes action over explanation. When an agent clicks a button or types text, you do not need a paragraph explaining why. You need the action to happen correctly and a brief confirmation that it did.
Verbosity is the default failure mode of every LLM-powered tool. Fighting it explicitly is not optional - it is the single highest-leverage instruction you can give.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.