241–250 of 325 posts
You still have to look at the diffs because it won’t have external knowledge to the codebase or make the best decisions.
It does find bugs and keep things simple.
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Pairs nicely with the fact that smell is the sense most likely to be experienced differently between two people :)
Is that actually true? Just because English treats scents as only describable by analogy doesnt mean all languages do. There are a number of languages with scent descriptions for aspects of a smell that are transferrable. [1] That suggests everyone is capable of decomposing a scent into components the same way. If that's true, we're left with a question equivalent to "does everyone see the same red?". As far as I kno…
Looking into it, it seems like smell has the most potential for genetic variance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3990440/
That said, I can’t find any direct research comparing perceived senses. So they (and now I) might have oversimplified.
Thanks for the link, looks interesting!
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Sometimes the fact you mentioned “signing commit messages” is exactly why it starts signing commit messages, and it’s better to start with no prompt at all. Negative prompting is very unreliable. Giving exact instructions on how you want commits made will give you better results.
How am I supposed to take this tool seriously if it struggles with the concept of "dont"? if what you're suggesting is true, then more important instructions like "Don't delete the production database" are a problem. I shouldn't need to consider how to phrase "Don't delete the production database" in a positive manner. Isn't the point of an AI agent that it understands my intent and I don't need to hold its hand? I'm…
I've seen lots of code that people have maintained for 20 years and its full of these duplication and worse. In fact I'm sad to say that majority of code I've seen people write and maintain is worse than what LLMs produce today. Often it is inexperience, sometimes it is willful negligence, but most often it is just tight deadlines and pressure to do finish whatever is being done right now. People know how to do it be…
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How am I supposed to take this tool seriously if it struggles with the concept of "dont"? if what you're suggesting is true, then more important instructions like "Don't delete the production database" are a problem. I shouldn't need to consider how to phrase "Don't delete the production database" in a positive manner. Isn't the point of an AI agent that it understands my intent and I don't need to hold its hand? I'm…
Absolutely. It should simply not have permissions to delete your production database, can’t rely on prompting alone for that kind of safety. These are still stochastic machines, guardrails must be inserted at the system level. They are getting better every day about managing their own guardrails, so we will get there eventually.
There's a really major problem with the concept of human-in-the-loop though, which is just that humans are not built for that that kind of work. It's like all those tests against the TSA where they manage to sneak something through that should have been caught. But the problem is, a TSA agent sees probably like 1000 things they can ignore to the 1 thing they need to look at, and it's easy to just start rubber stamping things.
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My experience is the more things you add to the list, the worse agents perform (I'm not exactly the first person to notice this) I actually have a pretty simple set of instructions right now and Claude still regularly messes them up. Like, my first instructions are: - Never commit to git without permission. - Never sign commit messages You know what it constantly does? Commits without permissions and signs commit mes…
I’m not a Claude code user, is there really no way to get it to not commit to git other than “asking it nicely in a prompt”? I thought there was some sort of permission system?
I could ban it from using git, but having access to git logs helps it do work so I don't want to go that far. I could probably ban the subcommand, but as a convenience I do like to be able to ask it to make a commit. (I'm not super attached to this, I frequently commit myself just to avoid these issues). It does tend to write good commit messages, so sometimes I ask it to generate the commit message and then just do the operation myself, which kind of sucks in the sense of feeling like reverse-centaur (Cory Doctorow term). (The reason I do that is sometimes it gets confused where if I greenlit one commit, it assumes all future commits are greenlit)
I guess the other option would be to not use "auto" mode, but god there's just no way I want to sit around and it "yes" 50x a session. I'd rather just sandbox it and nuke it if it does something too stupid.
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How am I supposed to take this tool seriously if it struggles with the concept of "dont"? if what you're suggesting is true, then more important instructions like "Don't delete the production database" are a problem. I shouldn't need to consider how to phrase "Don't delete the production database" in a positive manner. Isn't the point of an AI agent that it understands my intent and I don't need to hold its hand? I'm…
If you're relying on asking the LLM "pwease don't delete" then you're already in trouble. This kind of stuff doesn't work with people either and they generally exhibit actual signs of intelligence.
Write yourself a /review command. That is an empty markdown file at `.claude/commands/review.md`. In it, put a checklist of things the agent should look for. When you’re ready to have your agent review the code, type `/review`. The checklist will be examined and it’ll plan out some findings to ask you if you want them fixed. Mine starts with “Enter plan mode. Examine the differences on this branch vs. main. Consider:…
My experience is the more things you add to the list, the worse agents perform (I'm not exactly the first person to notice this) I actually have a pretty simple set of instructions right now and Claude still regularly messes them up. Like, my first instructions are: - Never commit to git without permission. - Never sign commit messages You know what it constantly does? Commits without permissions and signs commit mes…
Crazy how many engineers in here just say they are using another prompt on top. From my experience that makes things worse. It does abstractions, but the wrong ones. It overcomments, confusing future calls of the LLM. To me building on multiple scalable systems this has been the most dangerous part of LLMs. On a good codebase it will work good, but it will maek it worse, so you keep using it, till it doesnt work and…
It’s not enough to read code. You don’t internalize it. You need to experience it painfully :)
Also agents frequently defensively wrap old code instead of questioning whether legacy paths should exist. You get this nested doll layering effect of extremely large amounts of defensive code.