Comment by no-name-here
6 hours ago
> The real issue is the existing system needs to change entirely to facilitate, I know this, Good developers know this
1. I’ll often include boilerplate in a prompt to tell it to make the broader fix. [1]
2. However, a top HN AGENTS.md post 11 days ago included the standard guidance “As much as possible try to minimize the number of changed lines when implementing a feature.” I.e. some devs want LLMs to avoid broader changes and so some of that likely makes it into the training, even if others like us want the opposite.
[1] As far as whether my boilerplate is effective, I don’t know.
The default case when implementing a change should obviously be to make changes with as minimal a blast radius as is reasonable. This is basic software engineering and current LLMs fail it. LLMs also don't have a good idea of what is "reasonable" and a human judgement call is needed.
The case where a (sub)system needs a complete rewrite to admit a feature without incurring too much technical debt should be the exception. When exactly to make that exception is something that clearly currently requires a human judgement call, as models aren't yet nearly smart enough to make such calls.