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

nrehiew.github.io

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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

mirekrusin wrote: post #217
phito wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wasting a ton of tokens doing that though. Right now you don't realize it because they're being heavily subsidized, but you will understand the point of have good orchestration and memory files when you will have to pay the real cost of your use.

Cost cannot go up, only down with time (with occasional short term fluctuations). Competition, including open weight models and consumer hardware (ie upcoming M5 Ultra) keeps moving ceiling of what you can charge down.

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by max_streese »

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…

To people stating these high commit numbers: What is your average changeset size? I have found that having agent do large changes (few hundred lines or more) results in a lot of friction for me and it feels like at some point I leave a happy path where instead of moving quickly I get dragged down.

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

#223

Post by Lionga »

jampekka wrote: post #220
Calavar wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sorts of instructions?

Usually I just put something like "Prefer DRY code". I like to keep my AGENTS.md DRY too :)

also add "no hallucinations" and "make it works this time pretty please" while also say Claude will go to jail if does not do it right should work all the time (so like 60%)

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

#224

Post by jampekka »

Lionga wrote: post #223
jampekka wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually I just put something like "Prefer DRY code". I like to keep my AGENTS.md DRY too :)

also add "no hallucinations" and "make it works this time pretty please" while also say Claude will go to jail if does not do it right should work all the time (so like 60%)

There are of course limits to what prompting can do, but it does steer the models.

In TFA they found that prompting mitigates over-editing up to about 10 percentage points.

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

#225

Post by gpderetta »

cortesoft wrote: post #63
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I‘m saying this as someone who uses AI for coding a lot and mostly love it) Yeah, but is that really the same? Compilers work deterministically — if it works once, it will work always. LLMs are a different story for now.

LLMs are deterministic, too. I know there is randomness in the choosing tokens, but that randomness is derived from a random seed that can be repeated.

LLMs are deterministic[1], but the only way to determine the output is to empirically run them. With compilers, both the implementor and a power user understand the specific code transformations they are capable of, so you can predict their output with good accuracy. I.e. LLMs are probably chaotic systems.

edit: there might be a future where we develop robopsychology enough to understand LLM more than black boxes, we we are not there yet.

[1] Aside from injected randomness and parallel scheduling artifacts.

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

#226

Post by gpderetta »

cortesoft wrote: post #96
lelanthran wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have an incorrect mental model of how LLMs work. There's plenty of resources online to rectify that, though.

I think you may be misreading my comment, then, because I know how LLMs work. Which part of my comment do you think shows that I don’t?

maybe you have a wrong mental model on how compiler works then. I'm not a compiler developer, but usually I have a pretty good idea on what code gcc will generate for my C++: it is far from a black box.

Also compilers usually compose well: you can test snippets of code in isolation and the generated code it will have at least some relation to whatever asm would be generated when the snippet is embedded in a larger code base (even under inter-procedural optimizations or LTO, you can predict and often control how it will affect the generated code).

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

#229

Post by rustyhancock »

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 think on HN atleast. People enamoured by Claude are the vocal majority.

The view of Claude on HN is extremely positive and nearly every thread will have highly positive comment "that is not an ad".

I think people are seeing others just irked by the constant stream what feels like ads and reading it as Claude being somehow disliked.

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

#230

Post by freedomben »

theshrike79 wrote: post #213
Swizec wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The trick is to "just use it", BUT every few weeks grab the logs (you do keep them, right?) and have a session with the model to find out if there are any repeated patterns. If you find any, consider making them into skills or /commands or maybe even add them to AGENTS.md.

Which logs do you use for that?
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