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

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

#241

Post by Pannoniae »

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?

1. Fairly - I definitely don't see any training material about the stuff I do on the internet:D it's really far from your avg front-end app. And of course you can't let any of those make decisions automatically. Remember the IBM quote, "a computer can not be held accountable therefore a computer must not make any management decisions"... Even on completely greenfield and groundbreaking projects there's lots of throwaway code, scaffolding and so on. You contribute the value-add, you use the flanker to speed up the boring and grey parts.

2. Regulation? I'm sceptical that the cat can be put back into the bag. It's already out there. More realistic problem is the business model part - openweight/local provides a counterpoint to that.

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

#242

Post by agdexai »

magicalhippo wrote: post #40
aerhardt wrote: post #23

I'm building a website in Astro and today I've been scaffolding localization. I asked Codex 5.4 x-high to follow the official guidelines for localization and from that perspective the implementation was good. But then it decides to re-write the copy and layout of all pages. They were placeholders, but still? Codex also has a tendency to apply unwanted styles everywhere. I see similar tendencies in backend and data wo…

You can steer it though. When I see it going off the reservation I steer it back. I also commit often, just about after every prompt cycle, so I can easily revert and pick up the ball in a fresh context. But yeah, I saw a suggestion about adding a long-lived agent that would keep track of salient points (so kinda memory) but also monitor current progress by main agent in relation to the "memory" and give the main age…

[dead]

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

#243

Post by terseus »

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.

If the cost is subsidized by another cash source (e.g. VC money) when the source stops prices can definitely go up.

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

#244

Post by kaoD »

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.

> everyone seems to have a radically different experience

What people have is radically different expectations.

I noticed engineers will review Claude's output and go "holy crap that's junior-level code". Coders will just commit because looking at the code is a waste of time. Move fast, break things, disrupt, drown yourself into tech debt: the investors won't care anyways.

And no, telling the agent to "be less shit" doesn't work. I have to painstakingly point every single shit architectural decision so Claude can even see and fix it. "Git gud" didn't work for people and doesn't work for LLMs.

It's not that the code isn't DRY, it's just DRY at the wrong points of abstraction, which is even worse than not being DRY. I manage to find better patterns in each and every single task I tell Claude or Copilot to autonomously work on, dropping tons of code in the process (DRY or not). You can't prompt Claude out of making these wrong decisions (at best from very basic mistakes) since they are too granular to even extract a rule.

This is what separates a senior from a junior.

If you think Claude writes good code either you're very lucky, I'm very bad at prompting, or your standards are too low.

Don't get me wrong. I love Claude Code, but it's just a tool in my belt, not an autonomous engineer. Seeing all these "Claude wrote 97% of my code" makes me shudder at the amount of crap I will have to maintain 5 years down the line.

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

#245

Post by archerx »

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 used Claude to help me with a function once and it added a memory leak, it wouldn’t have been noticeable to most people but I saw. I still write my own code and find LLMs frustrating because they almost get it right and it’s just more efficient for me to just write the code correctly instead of having an LLM write something that’s almost correct and me fixing it after the fact.

I can’t wait for all the future vibe coded projects to be exploited by the black hats waiting in the shadows for things to reach a critical state. I don’t believe in anthropic because they love to lie.

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

#246

Post by PunchyHamster »

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.

Because it is that uneven. Some problems it nails at first go or with very little cosmetic changes.

In others it decides on solution, hallucinates parts that do not exist like adding API calls or config options that do not exists and gets the basics wrong.

Similarly you do something that's somewhat common pattern, it usually nails it. If you do something that subtly differs in certain way from a common pattern, it will just do the common pattern and you get something wrong.

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

#247

Post by Swizec »

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.

> You're wasting a ton of tokens doing that though.

My time is worth more than tokens. I’m thinking of maybe creating some .md files to save me time in code review. If I do it right, it’s going to cost more in tokens because the robots will do more.

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

#248

Post by yamajun93 »

cassianoleal wrote: post #25
ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The idea being that if you're working in an area, you should refactor and tidy it up and clean up "tech debt" while there. This is horrible practice, and very typical junior behavior that needs to be corrected against. Unless you wrote it, Chesterton's Fence applies; you need to think deeply for a long time about why that code exists as it does, and that's not part of your current task. Nothing worse than dealing wi…

That is the flip side of what you're arguing against, and is also very typical junior behaviour that needs to be corrected against. Tech debt needs to be dealt with when it makes sense. Many times it will be right there and then as you're approaching the code to do something else. Other times it should be tackled later with more thought. The latter case is frequently a symptom of the absence of the former. In Extreme…

This is a real pain, I notice over-editing a lot when using AI coding tools locally and also re-inventing the wheel (e.g not using external libraries or reimplementing something over and over again). The Boy Scouting Rule is a good framing, but the tricky part is deciding when we apply it and what's actually a 'minimal' change. Maybe smt like 10% of the PR should be refactor max, and if is more open a new PR?

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

#249

Post by seamossfet »

mnkypete wrote: post #38
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share some of the feelings about 'not understanding what is actually happening under the hood', I can't help but think about how this feeling is the exact same response that programmers had when compilers were invented: https://vivekhaldar.com/articles/when-compilers-were-the--ai... We are completely comfortable now letting the compilers do their thing, and never seem to worry that we "don't know what is actu…

Except that compilers are (at least to a large degree) deterministic. It's complexity that you don't need to worry about. You don't need to review the generated assembly. You absolutely need to review AI generated code.

People often use "non-deterministic" to imply "unreliable" when that's not always the case. You can have an LLM that's clearly non-deterministic but also reliable for tasks.

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

#250

Post by figassis »

Over editing is one of the biggest tells of junior engineers. Often, a very big task is reduced to a 1 line change if you spend the time to understand the core problem.

I feel like this was one of the most valuable skills an engineer could learn, as it protects the integrity of the system by making minimum viable changes. If you need to refactor something, it should be clear that that is the task.

But we're all tokenmaxing now.

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