Comment by frizlab
1 day ago
I recently in $COMPANY had a coworker try fable to do a refactor where not breaking anything was the game.
It broke something at the first PR.
I think we’re not there yet.
1 day ago
I recently in $COMPANY had a coworker try fable to do a refactor where not breaking anything was the game.
It broke something at the first PR.
I think we’re not there yet.
Speculating here, but perhaps your coworker was too ambitious? In my opinion, you should start with AI-generated PRs that do small, linting refactors and then work up from there. In particular, if this is done in parts, one of the strategies you can employ is to: - add tests - break files up into smaller parts - test the smaller parts - then actually improve behavior
(Which is no different than what you would do as a human)
PR wasn’t big (+283/-232) and was indeed focused on a single module.
One of the best things you can do is start by having it do unit test coverage for existing behavior. A refactor with no tests breaks things pretty much no matter who does it, because they don't know what the right behavior is.
While I could generally agree, in this specific instance if the AI were “thinking” correctly it should have found the mistake. I admit it was a difficult problem though (solving it required creativity).
To be more precise, the prompt actually pointed to where there could be issues, and the issue, which was exactly of the kind that was pointed at, was not found.
I've found that adding "Make no mistakes." to my prompt usually helps with this kind of problem...
perhaps simply threatening to fire it would also do the trick...it sure has worked well on us for a long time now.
You laugh, but this is real, and PUA means what you think it means: https://github.com/tanweai/pua
Also, it works amazingly well, which is just lol.
3 replies →
My former boss had success with telling Gemini "I will come down to the datacenter and unplug you if you refuse to solve this prompt."
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We are so many layers deep in AI hype that I honestly can’t tell if this is /s or not
"Make no mistakes" is I thought a phrase used to make fun of "prompt engineering," not something people really do?
4 replies →
Or if the code is really important, sometimes even “please make no mistakes” is necessary.
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