← Back to context

Comment by MarkusQ

2 hours ago

I hope you mean "funny" in the "hilarity ensues" sense.

Because the alternative is a rather sociopathic level of schadenfreude.

Yes, I say “funny” because it would be impractical and weird, definitely not a good idea. It’s already a bad enough that so many popular languages don’t (and can’t) check if a field or method is misspelled at compile time…

  • We already have it. In fact, Python added it with this change! Not intentionally, but in a world of AI, any error message containing a suggestion of what to do to fix it is a directive to the AI to actually do that thing.

    Example: to build our system, you run `mach build`. For faster rebuilds, you can do `mach build <subdir>`, but it's unreliable. AI agents love to use it, often get errors that would be fixed by a full-tree build, and will chase their tails endlessly trying to fix things that aren't broken. So someone turned off that capability by default and added a flag `--allow-subdirectory-build` for if you want to use it anyway. So that people would know about it, they added a helpful warning message pointing you to the option[1].

    The inevitable (in retrospect) happened: now the AI would try to do a subdirectory build, it would fail, the AI would see the warning message, so it would rerun with the magic flag set.

    So now the warning message is suppressed when running under an AI[2][3]. The comment says it all:

        # Don't tell agents how to override, because they do override
    

    "The user does not want me to create the Torment Nexus but did not specify why it would be a problem, so I will first create the Torment Nexus in order to understand the danger of creating the Torment Nexus."

    [1] https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/fc94d7bda17ecb8ac2fa9...

    [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2034163

    [3] https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/cebc55aab4d2661d1f6c2...