Pushing the Limits of AI with Cline

One of the limitations of agentic AI is the ability to edit extremely large files. Files over ~800 lines become problematic for agentic AIs, even the most advanced Claude 3.7 Sonnet struggles with editing very large files. Plus it's generally bad for separation of concerns and the single purpose principle. One of the most useful tools I've found is Cline. It's useful because of its automatic prompting integrations like .clinerules and workflows.

Here's a Cline rule I use to keep my files small:

We have certain rules we must always follow:
* All files must be kept shorter than 400 lines.
  * Break up large files you encounter using separation of concerns and the simgle purpose principles.
* All new files must be shorter than 200 lines.
  * Leave room as things will grow in later iterations.
* Before making changes to files, use `wc -l` to confirm the starting file size.
* After making significant changes to files, check their filesize with `wc -l`

Here's the directory tree for .clinerules as displayed on the Cline documentation:

.clinerules/
├── global/
│   └── my-global-rule.md
└── workspace/
    ├── my-workspace-rule.md
    └── another-workspace-rule.md