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by jstanley20 hours ago |
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upvoteby _pastel19 hours ago|
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The tradeoff is highly contextual; it's not a tradeoff an agent can always make by inspecting the project themselves.

Even within the same project, for a given PR, there are some parts of the codebase I want to modify freely and some that I want fixed to reduce the diff and testing scope.

I try to explain up-front to the agent how aggressively they can modify the existing code and which parts, but I've had mixed success; usually they bias towards a minimal diff even if that means duplication or abusing some abstractions. If anyone has had better success, I'd love to hear your approach.

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upvoteby mncharity17 hours ago|
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Just brainstorming, but perhaps a more tangible gradient, with social backpressure? Imagine three identical patch tools: "patch", "submit patch", and "send patch to chief architect and wait". With the "where each can be used" explained or even enforced. Having the contrast of less-aggressive options, might make it easier to encourage more aggressive refactoring elsewhere. Or pushing the impact further up the CoT, "patch'ing X requires an analysis field describing less invasive alternatives and their un/suitability; for Y, just do it, refactor aggressively".
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upvoteby ZihangZ7 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby jauntywundrkind15 hours ago|
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To get the agent to think for itself sometimes it feels like I have to delete a bunch of code and markdown first. Instruction to refactor/reconsider broadly has such mild success, I find.

I'll literally run an agent & tell it to clean up a markdown file that has too much design in it, delete the technical material, and/or delete key implementations/interfaces in the source, then tell a new session to do the work, come up with the design. (Then undelete and reconcile with less naive sessions.)

Path dependence is so strong. Right now I do this flow manually but I would very much like to codify this, make a skill for this pattern that serves so well.

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upvoteby jdkoeck15 hours ago|
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Tell me you’re using Codex without telling me you’re using Codex :)
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