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(op here btw) - the question isn't "can models make code better" - its "left fully unattended, will they turn your codebase to slop over time"

from the footnotes (sorry if this got a little buried)

> yes of course you can get gpt-5.5 xhigh to do BRILLIANT refactors. But you had to tell it to do that. And to tell it to do that you had to understand your codebase well enough to know it needed doing. We're here talking about why lights-off wont work

i suppose this would also be a good place to ask if you fall in the "high stakes production systems" camp

> If you love vibe coding, please, go on vibing. I still vibe code lots of things, I just also maintain lots of production software (and through HumanLayer, help 1000s of other engineers do the same), so the rest of this is aimed at folks solving hard problems in complex codebases.

by satvikpendem42 minutes ago|

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GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable are similar step changes, not 5.5, but that's beside the point. If in the Markdown instruction files you ask them to periodically clean up the code or refactor where necessary then that's what they'll do. They don't explicitly do it because otherwise people, as they had for previous models, complain where models are asked to change one thing then they rewrite whole systems, so now the latest models are explicitly trained on instruction following.

In other words you can make the AI act like a software engineer complete with fixing and improving code autonomously (Cursor gave a glimpse of this [0]). It is not a failure of the model to do this automatically but a failure of the human having the wrong instructions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982535

by dhorthy18 minutes ago|

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i guess to clarify my contention:

generic prompting like "review this code" or "make the architecture better" will raise the floor but cannot come close to human-quality code without humans understanding what code exists and what to ask for.

Obviously cursor and other labs have a stake in this going one direction, but I don't buy it, and I don't think you should either.

In fact, "Rebuild sqlite from spec" has all the problems with every other benchmark that I cited - model knows the whole problem up front and never has to iterate on the pile of slop it created cheating its way to a solution.

In any case, politely, I think we're mostly arguing vibes here and I'm not sure its going to get anywhere.