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Comment by tekacs

4 hours ago

I'm excited to see whether the instruction following improvements play out in the use of Codex.

The biggest issue I'e seen _by far_ with using GPT models for coding has been their inability to follow instructions... and also their tendency to duplicate-act on messages from up-thread instead of acting on what you just asked for.

I think thats part of the issue I have with it constantly.

Let's say I am solving a problem. I suggest strategy Alpha, a few prompts later I realize this is not going to work. So I suggest strategy Bravo, but for whatever reason it will hold on to ideas from A and the output is a mix of the two. Even if I say forget about Alpha we don't want anything to do that, there will be certain pieces which only makes sense with Alpha, in the Bravo solution. I usually just start with a new chat at that point and hope the model is not relying on previous chat context.

This is a hard problem to solve because its hard to communicate our internal compartmentalization to a remote model.

I've only had that happen when I use /compact, so I just avoid compacting altogether on Codex/Claude. No great loss and I'm extremely skeptical anyway that the compacted summary will actually distill the specific actionable details I want.