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Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

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Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#41

Post by singpolyma3 »

danpalmer wrote: post #8

In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits. They lack the ability to sequence work and understand dependencies efficiently enough to manage it – it's not that they can't do small PRs, it's that doing them takes vastly more resources which then hits context limits etc. And if you want to then go back and edit a stack of commits or PRs, rebasing work into the middle,…

A human should be able to take the work and break it up properly during rework though.

Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#42

Post by sipjca »

bawolff wrote: post #16

>I'm tired boss. I'm tired of reviewing one, two, three thousand line PRs because some agent was able to "one shot the whole issue." Small PRs were never asked for because they're easier to write, it's always been for the benefit of the reviewer. 100% but also "no" is a two letter word and one of the most important and hardest parts of being a maintainer.

As a maintainer just saying no and closing PRs is largely the solution

Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#43

Post by dboreham »

I worked for a human for a while who complained the same way. Problem was: it was a religion for him, not based in any reasonable logic. The large PRs needed to be large because they were adding features that couldn't be half-pregnant. The feature needed to be implemented fully in order to demo to customers or management. Once you have the whole thing coded and working it makes no sense to artificially split it into smaller pieces. That's unnecessary work you're doing only to satisfy the bloke with the beef about large PRs.

Anyway, absolutely none of that had anything to do with LLMs -- it was a function of a person who liked to control other people as much as possible. With LLMs I find they positively like to attack problems in small pieces. I can't recall ever having to ask one to subdivide the work. They usually just do that anyway.

Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#44

Post by Twirrim »

gosolozero wrote: post #39
danpalmer wrote: post #8

In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits. They lack the ability to sequence work and understand dependencies efficiently enough to manage it – it's not that they can't do small PRs, it's that doing them takes vastly more resources which then hits context limits etc. And if you want to then go back and edit a stack of commits or PRs, rebasing work into the middle,…

I think LLMs are actually great at breaking up work into workstreams and tasks. The issue is that tasks do not equal good PR stacks on their own. You’ll need to use feature slices instead (like do backend part -> PR it, etc). LLMs can do that, but you need to harness them into it.

I've had _some_ success by asking Codex write a full plan, broken up in to logical phases, complete with git commit points along the way.

It's probably not quite how I would approach doing git commits, but they're at least logical boundaries, and make narrative sense for a reviewer.

Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#47

Post by 4lx87 »

So ask the LLM to split it up into PRs of your preferred size. Or better yet, stop reviewing the code and review the working software instead. LLMs give far more substantive code reviews than humans and have for a while now.

Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#48

Post by jacquesm »

danpalmer wrote: post #8

In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits. They lack the ability to sequence work and understand dependencies efficiently enough to manage it – it's not that they can't do small PRs, it's that doing them takes vastly more resources which then hits context limits etc. And if you want to then go back and edit a stack of commits or PRs, rebasing work into the middle,…

That's just like humans though. Find me a developer that loves maintaining code and I'll show you 10 that love rewrites or greenfield.

Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant

#49

Post by leeoniya »

It's possible to do a large amount of AI-assisted work, then do a second/third/fourth pass to break it up into a reviewable stack of self-contained PRs. But it takes time, and there's no such thing as one-shotting it. And it's basically impossible to continuously rebase manually without burning tokens. The way to merge the stack is more-or-less "stop the world".

However, I have yet to see how this will play out with upstream contribs:

https://github.com/moment/luxon/discussions/1796

https://github.com/leeoniya/luxon/tree/leeoniya/perf-patches...

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