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I'm still having a hard time with coding agents. They are useful but also somehow immature hence dangerous. The other day I asked copilot with GPT4o to add docs
by rossant 1y ago
I'm still having a hard time with coding agents. They are useful but also somehow immature hence dangerous. The other day I asked copilot with GPT4o to add docstrings to my functions in a long Python file. It did a good job on the first half. But when I looked carefully, I realized the second half of my file was gone. Just like that. Half of my file had been silently deleted, replaced by a single terrifying comment along the lines of "continue similarly with the rest of the file". I use Git of course so I could recover my deleted code. But I feel I still can't fully trust an AI assistant that will silently delete hundreds of lines of my codebase just because it is too lazy or something.
- asadm 1y agothese models have hard time modifying LARGE files and then returning them back to you. That's inefficient too. What you want is to ask for list of changes and then apply them. That's what aider, codex, etc. all do. I made a tool to apply human-readable changes back to files, which you might find useful: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode https://github.com/asadm/vibemode aider has this feature too.
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoYour first mistake was using Copilot. Your second mistake was using GPT 4o
- duxup 1y agoI’ve also seen catastrophic failures where the code returned completely fails for numerous “obvious” problems, including but not limited to missing code. I tend to have to limit the code I share and ask more pointed / targeted questions in order to lead the AI to a non catastrophic result.