docs: anticipate unseen variations in Prime Claude; $dev and $silent run-mode variables - #217
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ddehilster merged 2 commits intoSep 14, 2026
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A vocabulary built only from the test inputs fits the test inputs. When an entry goes into a word list, dictionary or knowledge base, its family goes in with it -- abbreviations, synonyms, spelling and spacing variants, plurals, and qualified forms that mean something different -- and a pattern replaces a list where the variation is productive. An analyzer tuned to 100% on the 40 messages it was built from found about 80% of what the next 40 asked. And keep a set of inputs that is never tuned on, with expected results written down before the analyzer runs on it: that score is the honest one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Documents the two engine globals added in nlp-engine 3.8.4
(VisualText/nlp-engine PR: feat/run-mode-globals).
NLP++ previously had no way to ask which mode the engine was run in, so
analyzers hardcoded their diagnostic flags and no engine switch could
reach them. $dev lets a grammar gate its own debug passes on the caller's
intent:
G("verbose") = G("$dev");
On parse-en-us that one line cut analysis time 40% in default mode while
leaving -DEV output intact.
Both pages record two things that are easy to get wrong:
* -SILENT is not the opposite of -DEV. It selects the engine's quietest
configuration, which suppresses the analyzer's OWN output files too,
so a -SILENT run writes no out.txt at all. "Run fast but still write
my results" is default mode plus $dev-gated diagnostics.
* -SILENT is not a speed switch -- measured against default mode it made
no difference (8.39 vs 8.41 sec), because the default already writes
no dump files. The switch that costs real time is -DEV, at ~3.6x,
because it dumps a full parse tree per pass (137 files / 44 MB for a
9 KB input).
Added: Help/markdown/$dev.md, Help/markdown/$silent.md
Updated: the Special Variables table, and index.md under both the
Special Variables tree and the flat reference list.
check-help-docs.ps1: 0 broken links, 0 broken images, 0 table/index drift.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
(cherry picked from commit 6d61811)
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Two documentation changes, neither yet on
main.1. Prime Claude: anticipate unseen variations (
Help/markdown/vscode/prompts/00-prime-claude.md)Two new Rules of thumb, beside "Look in the libraries before you write a vocabulary", and the summary line updated:
Found building a reader of outbound client messages: tuned on 40 messages it scored 100%; on 40 it had never seen, written down beforehand, it found 81% of the asks. The misses were names the vocabulary had never been given ("BC", "SSN", "basic life support certification", "city and state of birth").
2.
$devand$silentrun-mode special variables (cherry-picked fromddehilster/visualtext-filesPR #4,6d61811)New pages
Help/markdown/$dev.mdand$silent.md, their rows inNLP_PP_Stuff/Special_Variables.md, and entries inindex.md. They were merged into the fork but never reachedmain.Not included: the fork's analyzer-templates submodule updates (
mainalready points at the same commit,6723c69), and uncommitted local work onfeat/english-lemmas(not commits).🤖 Generated with Claude Code