4 ms·
I had good experiences doing multi-hour refactoring/housekeeping tasks that basically consisted of applying the same steps and rules n times. Worth noting, a s
by smoe 4mo ago
I had good experiences doing multi-hour refactoring/housekeeping tasks that basically consisted of applying the same steps and rules n times.
Worth noting, a significant chunk of those runs involved the agent waiting for the compiler, linters, type checks, and test suites, as well as updating journals.
It’s not the agent sputtering out code for eight hours straight.
And naturally I spend more time on manual verification in the end as much less of it is happening during the coding process.
- culi 4mo ago> that basically consisted of applying the same steps and rules n times. Why use a non-deterministic, possibly hallucinatory, definitely expensive, LLM when it sounds like a codemod is the perfect solution for this?
- beepbooptheory 4mo agoThe money people spend on things I could probably do with an emacs macro...
- eru 4mo agoYour time to create that macro ain't free.
- jon_adler 4mo agoHow about coding an emacs macro with your agent?
- beepbooptheory 4mo agoI actually don't have any representation at the moment..
- ardacinar 4mo agoNeither is your time writing that prompt. When people are talking about elaborate prompts, with a lot of detailed instructions, guardrails etc. I'm kind of assuming it takes time.
- smoe 4mo agoIn this case, handling all the edge cases and variants, and testing a codemod, would have taken significantly more of my time, which costs quite a bit more than the LLM. Obviously, a deterministic tool is preferable in general, but it is not always worth bothering with for a one off task.
- mashlol 4mo agoI usually make the llms do that part for me. Instead of asking the llm to refactor, ask it to write the codemod script that'll refactor, have it test that script, and even have it run it on its own. It's definitely faster and less error prone that way for me.
- culi 4mo agoIn that case, your original description of "basically consisted of applying the same steps and rules n times" was misleading.
- queuebert 4mo ago> ... applying the same steps and rules n times I do this too, with a document written for this purpose. > ... a significant chunk of those runs involved the agent waiting for the compiler, linters, type checks, and test suites, as well as updating journals. That is a good point. I'm mostly using C, which seemingly compiles in O(1) time, so I could imagine a large C++ or Rust codebase taking much longer to iterate simply due to compilation times.