Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
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Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#2Yeah I have always felt GPT 5.4 does too much. It is amazing at following instructions precisely but it convinces itself to do a bit too much.
I am surprised Gemini 3.1 Pro is so high up there. I have never managed to make it work reliably so maybe there's some metric not being covered here.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#3It's funny, because the wisdom that was often taught ( but essentially never practiced ) was "Refactor as you go".
The idea being that if you're working in an area, you should refactor and tidy it up and clean up "tech debt" while there.
In practice, it was seldom done, and here we have LLMs actually doing it, and we're realising the drawbacks.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#4Conversely, I often find coding agents privileging the existing code when they could do a much better job if they changed it to suit the new requirement.
I guess it comes down to how ossified you want your existing code to be.
If it's a big production application that's been running for decades then you probably want the minimum possible change.
If you're just experimenting with stuff and the project didn't exist at all 3 days ago then you want the agent to make it better rather than leave it alone.
Probably they just need to learn to calibrate themselves better to the project context.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#5Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this:
1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script the agent has assembled is too enticing. But, I've already wiped a DB or two just because the agent thought it was the right thing to do. I've also caught it sending my AWS credentials to deployment targets when it should never do that.
2. I've learned nothing. So the cognitive load of doing it myself, even assembling a simple docker command, is just too high. Thus, I repeatedly fallback to the "crutch" of using AI.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#6I always described it as over-complicating the code, but doing too much is a better diagnosis.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#7I think the industry has leaned waaay too far into completely autonomous agents. Of course there are reasons why corporations would want to completely replace their engineers with fully autonomous coding agents, but for those of us who actually work developing software, why would we want less and less autonomy? Especially since it alienates us from our codebases, requiring more effort in the future to gain an understanding of what is happening.
I think we should move to semi-autonomous steerable agents, with manual and powerful context management. Our tools should graduate from simple chat threads to something more akin to the way we approach our work naturally. And a big benefit of this is that we won't need expensive locked down SOTA models to do this, the open models are more than powerful enough for pennies on the dollar.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#8It's funny, because the wisdom that was often taught ( but essentially never practiced ) was "Refactor as you go". The idea being that if you're working in an area, you should refactor and tidy it up and clean up "tech debt" while there. In practice, it was seldom done, and here we have LLMs actually doing it, and we're realising the drawbacks.
That's a real question, maybe the changes are useful, though I think I'd like to see some examples. I do not trust cognitive complexity metrics, but it is a little interesting that the changes seem to reliably increase cognitive complexity.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#9Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this: 1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script th…
Must consider ourselves lucky for having the intuition to notice skill stagnation and atrophy.
Only helps if we listen to it :) which is fun b/c it means staying sharp which is inherently rewarding
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#10Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this: 1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script th…
Why are you letting the LLM drive? Don't turn on auto-approve, approve every command the agent runs. Don't let it make design or architecture decisions, you choose how it is built and you TELL that clanker what's what! No joke, if you treat the AI like a tool then you'll get more mileage out of it. You won't get 10x gains, but you will still understand the code.