Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
alexmolas.com
Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
1–10 of 199 posts
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#2A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#3A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.
I'd say it's more likely guaranteed to give you back a corrupted version of the file.
I assume OP was lucky because the initial file seems like it was at the very start of the context window, but if it had been at the end it would have returned a completely hallucinated mess.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#4Don't take this as career advice!
This is an amusing anecdote. But the only lesson to be learned is to commit early, commit often.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#5A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.
I dont know where Gemini stores the context, but if I’m using a local LLM client app, that context is on my machine verbatim.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#6A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.
Well, it'll give you what the tokenizer generated. This is often close enough for working software, but not exact. I notice it when asking claude for the line number of the code with specific implementation. It'll often be off by a few because of the way it tokenizes white space.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#7A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.
I dont know where Gemini stores the context, but if I’m using a local LLM client app, that context is on my machine verbatim.
If you ask the LLM to give you back that context does it give back to you verbatim?
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#8A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.
I frequently (basically every conversation) have issues with Claude getting confused about which version of the file it should be building on. Usually what causes it is asking it do something, then manually editing the file to remove or change something myself and giving it back, telling it it should build on top of what I just gave it. It usually takes three or four tries before it will actually use what I just gave it, and from then on it keeps randomly trying to reintroduce what I deleted.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#9Ok great, now u have retrieved that code that you dont even understand and is completely unmaintainable.
Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?
#10I cannot wrap my head around the anecdote that opens the article:
> Lately I’ve heard a lot of stories of AI accidentally deleting entire codebases or wiping production databases.
I simply... I cannot. Someone let a poorly understood AI connected to prod, and it ignored instructions, deleted the database, and tried to hide it. "I will never use this AI again", says this person, but I think he's not going far enough: he (the human) should be banned from production systems as well.
This is like giving full access to production to a new junior dev who barely understands best practices and is still in training. This junior dev is also an extraterrestrial with non-human, poorly understood psychology, selective amnesia and a tendency to hallucinate.
I mean... damn, is this the future of software? Have we lost our senses, and in our newfound vibe-coding passion forgotten all we knew about software engineering?
Please... stop... I'm not saying "no AI", I do use it. But good software practices remain as valid as ever, if not more!