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

231–240 of 267 posts

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

#231

Post by keybored »

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…

The silent majority of GenAI praise reaches the top of the thread again.

Edit: The lurkers and the commenters must be a pretty different set of people I suppose.

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

#232

Post by wongarsu »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #208
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…

Right - I have a ton of coworkers who obsess over "skills" and different ways to run agents and whatnot but I just... spend some time to give very thorough, detailed instructions and it just Does The Thing. I rarely fight with Claude Code these days.

We probably need something like the WET principle for skills. If you need to explain the same thing to an agent more than twice, turn it into a skill (or add it to AGENTS.md, or CLAUDE.md, or to you docs folder, or your guides folder, or whatever method you use). If you haven't needed to explain it more than twice, it's probably fine. The context pollution from the skill would likely be worse than not having the skill

Of course exceptions apply. Some basic information that will reliably be discovered is still worth adding to your AGENTS.md to cut down on token use. But after a couple obvious things you quickly get into the realm of premature optimization (unless you actually measure the effects)

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

#233

Post by pirates »

phito wrote: post #215
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…

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.

Company pays for company’s tokens, so company’s problem, not mine. I am happy to skill up and avoid overusing tokens for my personal sub, but if it’s getting results then I couldn’t care less how much my employer has to pay for it. They’re begging me to use it in the first place anyway.

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

#234

Post by archargelod »

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 am genuinely interested to know some details:

1. Is a product/software you develop novel? As in does it do something useful and unique? Or it's a product that already exists in many varietes and yours is just "one of ..."?

2. What if one day, LLMs will get regulated/become terrible/raise prices above your budget. Do you have plans for that?

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

#235

Post by cultofmetatron »

archargelod wrote: post #234
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 am genuinely interested to know some details: 1. Is a product/software you develop novel? As in does it do something useful and unique? Or it's a product that already exists in many varietes and yours is just "one of ..."? 2. What if one day, LLMs will get regulated/become terrible/raise prices above your budget. Do you have plans for that?

I'm in a similar situation

1. Even really novel projects have large chunks of glue code and boring infrastructure that the novel bits depend on. claude means I spend 10% of my time on the borng stuff and 90% of time on stuff I previously onky had 10% of my day to work on. In my experience the software picked up our idioms fast and for context, we have a skill file explaining code standards.

2. codex and gemini are comparable when paired with a good harness (pi.dev). if things ever get really bad, I'll drop 8k on a dedicated agent coding server and run it locally. I tried it recently with my current system and it was sub par but I was running a drasticly simpler model.

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

#236

Post by wongarsu »

freedomben wrote: post #230
theshrike79 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would assume those in ~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl. They contain full conversation history, including the tool calls that were made, how man tokens were consumed, etc

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

#237

Post by ianhxu »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #208
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…

Right - I have a ton of coworkers who obsess over "skills" and different ways to run agents and whatnot but I just... spend some time to give very thorough, detailed instructions and it just Does The Thing. I rarely fight with Claude Code these days.

Same here. For me, this means a spec doc split into features/UX, technical requirements, and language-specific requirements, iterated before the model touches code.

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

#238

Post by theshrike79 »

freedomben wrote: post #230
theshrike79 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Claude has a built-in /insights feature for this, but you can replicate it with any other tool that keeps the session logs on disk.

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

#240

Post by roncesvalles »

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.

>One of the strangest things about AI to me is that everyone seems to have a radically different experience.

I've thought about this and I think the reason is as follows: we hold code written by ourselves to a much higher standard than code written by somebody else. If you think of AI code as your own code, then it probably won't seem very acceptable because it lacks the beauty (partly subjective as all beauty tends to be) that we put into our own code. If you think of it as a coworker's code, then it's usually alright i.e. you wouldn't be wildly impressed with that coworker but it would also not be bad enough to raise a stink.

It follows from this that it also depends on how you regard the codebase that you're working on. Do you think of it as a personal masterpiece or is it some mishmash camel by committee as the codebases at work tend to be?

Post reply on HN