Comment by lofaszvanitt

13 hours ago

1000 loc of script, why even leave it there for the night? were there rocket trajectory calculations??? I don't think so. should be ready in 5 mins tops. why people make their own lives harder?

You should have some basic context file about software practices you prefer, otherwise it gets bloated.

4 comments

lofaszvanitt

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zzleeper  13 hours ago

I just went to bed and left it running; was expecting maybe 20 minutes :)

And I did gave the program a bunch of code guides -- this [1] for instance -- which included quotes like "Prefer straightforward code over clever code." but somehow that didn't matter.

[1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/overengineered-rand-mcnally...

  • chriskanan  10 hours ago

    I'm an AI professor, and the same thing happened to me. I had written out contracts and specs for some novel algorithms to compare. And instead it created a new sandboxed environment with 20k lines of code to ensure we do gold standard science.... didn't implement the algorithms at all. In another case, I left it overnight with a plan, and it decided to write a 50k line new overly engineered plan. Suffice to say, I don't use any frontier models for doing coding work anymore. I use them to make detailed plans and use good worker AIs for execution, which don't overthink everything.

  • jiggawatts  12 hours ago

    You write many pages telling the AI to split and structure the scripts into a bunch of folders, so why are you surprised it did exactly that!?

    I just ask it verbatim “recommend some cleanup” with /plan, review, and then apply.