Comment by esafak

19 days ago

Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you. You both search for what you need. Models can already memorize more than you !

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esafak

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Jensson  19 days ago

> Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you

Humans rewire their mind to optimize it for the codebase, that is why new programmers takes a while to get up to speed in the codebase. LLM doesn't do that and until they do they need the entire thing in context.

And the reason we can't do that today is that there isn't enough data in a single codebase to train an LLM to be smart about it, so first we need to solve the problem that LLM needs billions of examples to do a good job. That isn't on the horizon so we are probably safe for a while.

  • esafak  19 days ago

    Getting up to speed is a human problem. Computers are so fast they can 'get up to speed' from scratch for every session, and we help them with AGENTS files and newer things like memories; e.g., https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory

    It is not perfect yet but the tooling here is improving. I do not see a ceiling here. LSPs + memory solve this problem. I run into issues but this is not a big one for me.

Nextgrid  19 days ago

I’ll believe it when coding agents can actually make concise & reusable code instead of reimplementing 10 slightly-different versions of the same basic thing on every run (this is not a rant, I would love for agents to stop doing that, and I know how to make them - with proper AGENTS.md that serves as a table of contents for where stuff is - but my point is that as a human I don’t need this and yet they still do for now).

  • Revanche1367  19 days ago

    In my experience they can definitely write concise and reusable code. You just need to say to them “write concise and reusable code.” Works well for Codex, Claude, etc.