Comment by stavros
16 days ago
I've added an instruction: "do not implement anything unless the user approves the plan using the exact word 'approved'".
This has fixed all of this, it waits until I explicitly approve.
16 days ago
I've added an instruction: "do not implement anything unless the user approves the plan using the exact word 'approved'".
This has fixed all of this, it waits until I explicitly approve.
"NOT approved!"
"The user said the exact word 'approved'. Implementing plan."
Relevant comedy scene from Idiocracy (2006):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUcSb3PgeM
Lol it only took 20 years
2 replies →
There’s an extension to this problem which I haven’t got past. More generally I’d like the agent to stop and ask questions when it encounters ambiguity that it can’t reasonably resolve itself. If someone can get agents doing this well it’d be a massive improvement (and also solve the above).
Hm, with my "plan everything before writing code, plus review at the end" workflow, this hasn't been a problem. A few times when a reviewer has surfaced a concern, the agent asks me, but in 99% of cases, all ambiguity is resolved explicitly up front.
what gung-ho, talented-but-naive junior developer has ever done that?
In planning I sometimes add ”ask me questions as we go to iron out details and ambiguities.” Works quite well.
This. Just asking it to ask you questions before proceeding has saved me so much time from it making assumptions I don’t want. It’s the single most important part of almost all my prompts.