Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shall I implement it? No

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 603 posts

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#181

Post by bushido »

lubujackson wrote: post #173
inerte wrote: post #144

Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…

I feel like people are sleeping on Cursor, no idea why more devs don't talk about it. It has a great "Ask" mode, the debugging mode has recently gotten more powerful, and it's plan mode has started to look more like Claude Code's plans, when I test them head to head.

Cursor implemented something a while back where it started acting like how ChatGPT does when it's in its auto mode.

Essentially, choosing when it was going to use what model/reasoning effort on its own regardless of my preferences. Basically moved to dumber models while writing code in between things, producing some really bad results for me.

Anecdotal, but the reason I will never talk about Cursor is because I will never use it again. I have barred the use of Cursor at my company, It just does some random stuff at times, which is more egregious than I see from Codex or Claude.

ps. I know many other people who feel the same way about Cursor and other who love it. I'm just speaking for myself, though.

ps2. I hope they've fixed this behavior, but they lost my trust. And they're likely never winning it back.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#184

Post by alpaca128 »

BosunoB wrote: post #167
ForHackernews wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's smart enough to know that if you just didn't want it to proceed, you would just not respond to it. No it absolutely is not. It doesn't "know" anything when it's not responding to a prompt. It's not consciously sitting there waiting for you to reply.

I didn't mean to imply that it was. But when you reply to it, if you just say "no" then it's aware that you could've just not responded, and that normally you would never respond to it unless you were asking for something more. It just doesn't make any sense to respond no in this situation, and so it confuses the LLM and so it looks for more context.

> it's aware that you could've just not responded

It's not aware of anything and doesn't know that a world outside the context window exists.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#186

Post by II2II »

siva7 wrote: post #30
reconnecting wrote: post #24

I’m not an active LLMs user, but I was in a situation where I asked Claude several times not to implement a feature, and that kept doing it anyway.

people read a bit more about transformer architecture to understand better why telling what not to do is a bad idea

I'm not sure that advice is effective either.

I use an LLM as a learning tool. I'm not interested in it implementing things for me, so I always ignore its seemingly frantic desires to write code by ignoring the request and prompting it along other lines. It will still enthusiastically burst into code.

LLMs do not have emotions, but they seem to be excessively insecure and overly eager to impress.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#187

Post by stavros »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #178
stavros wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've added an instruction: "do not implement anything unless the user approves the plan using the exact word 'approved'". This has fixed all of this, it waits until I explicitly approve.

There’s an extension to this problem which I haven’t got past. More generally I’d like the agent to stop and ask questions when it encounters ambiguity that it can’t reasonably resolve itself. If someone can get agents doing this well it’d be a massive improvement (and also solve the above).

Hm, with my "plan everything before writing code, plus review at the end" workflow, this hasn't been a problem. A few times when a reviewer has surfaced a concern, the agent asks me, but in 99% of cases, all ambiguity is resolved explicitly up front.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#188

Post by vidarh »

reconnecting wrote: post #172
vidarh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent 30 years seeing the junk many human developers deliver, so I've had 30 years to figure out how we build systems around teams to make broken output coalesce into something reliable. A lot of people just don't realise how bad the output of the average developer is, nor how many teams successfully ship with developers below average. To me, that's a large part of why I'm happy to use LLMs extensively. Some thi…

Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement. I assume that over time, the output improves because of the effort and time the developer invests in themselves. However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLM…

> Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.

This makes little sense to me. Yes, individual developers gets better. I've seen little to no evidence that the average developer has gotten better.

> However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now.

It might reduce that effort to zero from the same people who have always invested the bare minimum of effort to hold down a job. Most of them don't advance today either, and most of them will deliver vastly better results if they lean heavily on LLMs. On the high end, what I see experienced developers do with LLMs involves a whole lot of learning, and will continue to involve a whole lot of learning for many years, just like with any other tool.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#190

Post by BosunoB »

alpaca128 wrote: post #184
BosunoB wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply that it was. But when you reply to it, if you just say "no" then it's aware that you could've just not responded, and that normally you would never respond to it unless you were asking for something more. It just doesn't make any sense to respond no in this situation, and so it confuses the LLM and so it looks for more context.

> it's aware that you could've just not responded It's not aware of anything and doesn't know that a world outside the context window exists.

No, it has knowledge of what it is and how it is used.

I'm guessing you and the other guy are taking issue with the words "aware of" when I'm just saying it has knowledge of these things. Awareness doesn't have to imply a continual conscious state.

Post reply on HN