duplicated ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866913
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
#72Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this: 1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script th…
Why are you letting the LLM drive? Don't turn on auto-approve, approve every command the agent runs. Don't let it make design or architecture decisions, you choose how it is built and you TELL that clanker what's what! No joke, if you treat the AI like a tool then you'll get more mileage out of it. You won't get 10x gains, but you will still understand the code.
Because the degree to which the LLM prompts you back to the terminal is too frequent for the human to engage in parallel work.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#73Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this: 1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script th…
This seems like a really easy problem to solve. Just don't give the LLM access to any prod credentials[1]. If you can't repro a problem locally or in staging/dev environments, you need to update your deployment infra so it more closely matches prod. If you can't scope permissions tightly enough to distinguish between environments, update your permissions system to support that. I've never had anything even vaguely resembling the problems you are describing because I follow this approach.
[1] except perhaps read-only credentials to help diagnose problems, but even then I would only issue it an extremely short-lived token in case it leaks it somehow
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#74Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this: 1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script th…
I essentially have 3 modes:
1. Everything is specified, written and tested by me, then cleaned up by AI. This is for the core of the application.
2. AI writes the functions, then sets up stub tests for me to write. Here I’ll often rewrite the functions as they often don’t do what I want, or do too much. I just find it gets rid of a lot of boilerplate to do things this way.
3. AI does everything. This is for experiments or parts of an application that I am perfectly willing to delete. About 70% of the time I do end up deleting these parts. I don’t allow it to touch 1 or 2.
Of course this requires that the architecture is setup in a way where this is possible. But I find it pretty nice.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#75> Code review is already a bottleneck
Counterpoint: no it isn't
> makes this job dramatically harder
No it doesn't
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you letting the LLM drive? Don't turn on auto-approve, approve every command the agent runs. Don't let it make design or architecture decisions, you choose how it is built and you TELL that clanker what's what! No joke, if you treat the AI like a tool then you'll get more mileage out of it. You won't get 10x gains, but you will still understand the code.
It’s terribly slow
You can push thousands of LOC every day while approving manually. If you went any faster you would not be able to read the code.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#77Here, the author means the agent over-edits code. But agents also do "too much": as in they touch multiple files, run tests, do deployments, run smoke tests, etc... And all of this gets abstracted away. On one hand, its incredible. But on the other hand I have deep anxiety over this: 1. I have no real understanding of what is actually happening under the hood. The ease of just accepting a prompt to run some script th…
Why are you letting the LLM drive? Don't turn on auto-approve, approve every command the agent runs. Don't let it make design or architecture decisions, you choose how it is built and you TELL that clanker what's what! No joke, if you treat the AI like a tool then you'll get more mileage out of it. You won't get 10x gains, but you will still understand the code.
I have never found any utility in that. After all, you can still just review the diffs and ask it for explanation for sections instead.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you letting the LLM drive? Don't turn on auto-approve, approve every command the agent runs. Don't let it make design or architecture decisions, you choose how it is built and you TELL that clanker what's what! No joke, if you treat the AI like a tool then you'll get more mileage out of it. You won't get 10x gains, but you will still understand the code.
I have never found any utility in that. After all, you can still just review the diffs and ask it for explanation for sections instead.
> After all, you can still just review the diffs
anonu has explicitly said that they've wiped a database twice as a result of agents doing stuff. What sort of diff would help against an agent running commands, without your approval?
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#79With the pi-mono coding agent (running local, open models) this works very well:
"Do not modify any code; only describe potential changes."
I often add it to the end when prompting to e.g. review code for potential optimizations or refactor changes.
Re: Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
#80I've noticed AI's often try and hide failure by catching exceptions and returning some dummy value maybe with some log message buried in tons of extraneous other log messages. And the logs themselves are often over abbreviated and missing key data to successfully debug what is happening.
I suspect AI's learned to do this in order to game the system. Bailing out with an exception is an obvious failure and will be penalized, but hiding a potential issue can sometimes be regarded as a success.
I wonder how this extrapolates to general Q&A. Do models find ways to sound convincing enough to make the user feels satisfied and the go away? I've noticed models often use "it's not X, it's Y", which is a binary choice designed to keep the user away from thinking about other possibilities. Also they often come up with a plan of action at the end of their answer, a sales technique known as the "assumptive close", which tries to get the user to think about the result after agreeing with the AI, rather than the answer itself.