Comment by sgbeal
2 months ago
> Give coding agents access to intellisense and syntax highlighting.
i once asked an LLM if it could ingest code from an interactive session more easily if it were in appropriately-typed markdown fences and it said absolutely yes, and that the syntax highlighting fed to it that way helps it immensely. i was downright shocked that syntax highlighting was anything more than noise for them.
You can't trust what a model says about itself. It has no ability to introspect.
Why would this be surprising? That’s exactly how much of the code they were trained on is presented in PRs, Forums, etc.
Is that true? That depends on how their web scraping works, like whether it runs client-side highlighting, strips out HTML tags, etc.
The highlighting isn't what matters, its the pretext. E.g. An LLM seeing "```python" before a code block is going to better recall python codeblocks by people that prefixed them that way.