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

Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

nrehiew.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 267 posts

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#161

Post by mleo »

Isolated_Routes wrote: post #56

I think building something really well with AI takes a lot of work. You can certainly ask it to do things and it will comply, and produce something pretty good. But you don't know what you don't know, especially when it speaks to you authoritatively. So checking its work from many different angles and making sure it's precise can be a challenge. Will be interesting to see how all of this iterates over time.

If I don’t know what I don’t know, how am I going to build something any better than a coding agent? An approach on a couple of projects has been to prototype with the agent, learn, write a design and then start over. I then know the areas to look into more detail.

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#162

Post by rtpg »

hathawsh wrote: post #142

I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it fixes it, and I ask it to record what it learned in the relevant project-specific skills. It rarely makes that mistake again. When the skill file gets big, I ask Claude to clean and compact it. It does a great job. It doesn't really make sense economically for…

Are you writing code that gets reviewed by other people? Were code reviews hard in the past? Do your coworkers care about "code quality" (I mean this in scare quotes because that means different things to different people).

Are you working more on operational stuff or on "long-running product" stuff?

My personal headcanon: this tooling works well when built on simple patterns, and can handle complex work. This tooling has also been not great at coming up with new patterns, and if left unsupervised will totally make up new patterns that are going to go south very quickly. With that lens, I find myself just rewriting what Claude gives me in a good number of cases.

I sometimes race the robot and beat the robot at doing a change. I am "cheating" I guess cuz I know what I want already in many cases and it has to find things first but... I think the futzing fraction[0] is underestimated for some people.

And like in the "perils of laziness lost"[1] essay... I think that sometimes the machine trying too hard just offends my sensibilities. Why are you doing 3 things instead of just doing the one thing!

One might say "but it fixes it after it's corrected"... but I already go through this annoying "no don't do A,B, C just do A, yes just that it's fine" flow when working with coworkers, and it's annoying there too!

"Claude writes thorough tests" is also its own micro-mess here, because while guided test creation works very well for me, giving it any leeway in creativity leads to so many "test that foo + bar == bar + foo" tests. Applying skepticism to utility of tests is important, because it's part of the feedback loop. And I'm finding lots of the test to be mainly useful as a way to get all the imports I need in.

If we have all these machines doing this work for us, in theory average code quality should be able to go up. After all we're more capable! I think a lot of people have been using it in a "well most of the time it hits near the average" way, but depending on how you work there you might drag down your average.

[0]: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html [1]: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/the-peril-of-lazines...

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#164

Post by Gigachad »

collimarco wrote: post #148

Over-editing and over-adding... I can find solutions that are just a few lines of code in a single file where AI would change 10 files and add 100s of lines of code. Writing less code is more important than ever. Too much code means more technical debt, a maintainability nightmare and more places where bugs can hide.

I've seen this at work where people submit PRs that implement whole internal libraries to do something that could have been done with an existing tool or just done simpler in general.

It's impossible to properly review this in a reasonable time and they always introduce tons of subtle bugs.

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#165

Post by shimman »

maxbond wrote: post #156
hathawsh wrote: post #142

I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it fixes it, and I ask it to record what it learned in the relevant project-specific skills. It rarely makes that mistake again. When the skill file gets big, I ask Claude to clean and compact it. It does a great job. It doesn't really make sense economically for…

When I see people talking about Claude Code becoming "unusable" for them recently, I believe them, but I don't understand. It's a deeply flawed and buggy piece of software but it's very effective. One of the strangest things about AI to me is that everyone seems to have a radically different experience.

My workflow is to just use LLMs for small context work. Anything that involves multiple files it truly doesn't do better than what I'd expect from a competent dev.

It's bitten me several times at work, and I rather not waste any more of my limited time doing the re-prompt -> modify code manually cycle. I'm capable of doing this myself.

It's great for the simple tasks tho, most feature work are simple tasks IMO. They were only "costly" in the sense that it took a while to previously read the code, find appropriate changes, create tests for appropriate changes, etc. LLMs reduce that cycle of work, but that type of work in general isn't the majority of my time at my job.

I've worked at feature factories before, it's hell. I can't imagine how much more hell it has become since the introduction of these tools.

Feature factories treat devs as literal assembly line machines, output is the only thing that matters not quality. Having it mass induced because of these tools is just so shitty to workers.

I fully expect a backlash in the upcoming years.

---

My only Q to the OP of this thread is what kind of teacher they are, because if you teach people anything about software while admitting that you no longer write code because it's not profitable (big LOL at caring about money over people) is just beyond pathetic.

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#166

Post by Rekindle8090 »

Swizec wrote: post #155
hathawsh wrote: post #142

I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it fixes it, and I ask it to record what it learned in the relevant project-specific skills. It rarely makes that mistake again. When the skill file gets big, I ask Claude to clean and compact it. It does a great job. It doesn't really make sense economically for…

> I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. I looked at some stats yesterday and was surprised to learn Cursor AI now writes 97% of my code at work. Mostly through cloud agents (watching it work is too distracting for me) My approach is very simple: Just Talk To It People way overthink this stuff. It works pretty good. Sharing .md files and hyperfocusing on various orch…

[dead]

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#167

Post by hathawsh »

rtpg wrote: post #162
hathawsh wrote: post #142

I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it fixes it, and I ask it to record what it learned in the relevant project-specific skills. It rarely makes that mistake again. When the skill file gets big, I ask Claude to clean and compact it. It does a great job. It doesn't really make sense economically for…

Are you writing code that gets reviewed by other people? Were code reviews hard in the past? Do your coworkers care about "code quality" (I mean this in scare quotes because that means different things to different people). Are you working more on operational stuff or on "long-running product" stuff? My personal headcanon: this tooling works well when built on simple patterns, and can handle complex work. This toolin…

You hinted at an aspect I probably haven't considered enough: The code I'm working on already has many well-established, clean patterns and nearly all of Claude's work builds on those patterns. I would probably have a very different experience otherwise.

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#168

Post by arjie »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #78
arjie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never found any utility in that. After all, you can still just review the diffs and ask it for explanation for sections instead.

> After all, you can still just review the diffs anonu has explicitly said that they've wiped a database twice as a result of agents doing stuff. What sort of diff would help against an agent running commands, without your approval?

Agent does not have to run in your user context. It is easy mistake to make in yolo mode but after that it's easy to fix. e.g. this is what I use now so I can release agent from my machine and also constrain its access:

    $ main-app git:(main) kubectl get pods | grep agent | head -n 1 | sed -E 's/[a-z]+-agent(.*)/app-agent\1/'
    app-agent-656c6ff85d-p86t8                          1/1     Running     0             13d
Agent is fully capable of making PR etc. if you provide appropriate tooling. It wipes DB but DB is just separate ephemeral pod. One day perhaps it will find 0-day and break out, but so far it has not done it.

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#169

Post by gobdovan »

qurren wrote: post #103
btbuildem wrote: post #91

I wish there was a reliable way to choke the agents back and prevent them from doing this. Every line of code added is a potential bug, and they overzealously spew pages and pages of code. I've routinely gone through my (hobby) projects and (yes, still with the aid of an LLM) trimmed some 80% of the generated code with barely any loss of functionality. The cynic in me thinks it's done on purpose to burn more tokens.…

> if we had access to all the knobs and levers. We do, just tell it what you want in your AGENTS.md file. Agents also often respond well to user frustration signs, like threatening to not continue your subscription.

> Agents also often respond well to user frustration signs, like threatening to not continue your subscription.

From the phrasing, I can't but imagine you as a very calm, completely unemotional person that only emulates user frustration signs, strategically threatening AI that you'll close your subscription when it nukes your code.

Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

#170

Post by cortesoft »

betenoire wrote: post #141
cortesoft wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, LLMs ARE deterministic, just like all computer programs are. I get why that is in practice different then the manner in which compilers are deterministic, but my point is the difference isnt because of determinism.

I think you are misunderstanding the term "deterministic". Running on deterministic hardware does not mean an algorithm is deterministic. Create a program that reads from /dev/random (not urandom). It's not determistic.

Fair, although you can absolutely use local LLMs in a deterministic way (by using fixed seeds for the random number generation), and my point is that even if you did that with your LLM, it wouldn't change the feeling someone has about not being able to reason out what was happening.

In other words, it isn't the random number part of LLMs that make them seem like a black box and unpredictable, but rather the complexity of the underlying model. Even if you ran it in a deterministic way, I don't think people would suddenly feel more confident about the outputted code.

Post reply on HN