Comment by simonw
8 hours ago
I've not seen over-editing in Claude Code or Codex in quite a while, so I was interested to see the prompts being used for this study.
I think they're in here, last edited 8 months ago: https://github.com/nreHieW/fyp/blob/5a4023e4d1f287ac73a616b5...
Just had one today where GPT-5.4, instead of adding the 10 lines I asked for (an addition that could be done pretty mechanically by just looking at some previous code and adding a similar thing with different/new variable names) proceeded to rewrite 50 lines instead, because it was "cleaner". It was not. It also didn't originally add the thing I asked for either, which was perplexing.
Over-editing is definitely not some long gone problem. This was on xhigh thinking, because I forgot to set it to lower.
Likewise, this felt like an early agent problem to me.