Comment by ferguess_k
3 days ago
I guess with LLM as the reviewer, it is going to take a lot longer to be Zero Defect, unless they use LLM as the coder, too.
3 days ago
I guess with LLM as the reviewer, it is going to take a lot longer to be Zero Defect, unless they use LLM as the coder, too.
I tried that this summer. I encountered this doom loop where the review agent would find bugs, the coding agent would fix them in some overengineered way that introduced new bugs, the review agent found them, the coding agent made more while fixing them, repeat until insanity.
Not every time. But often enough.
FWIW gpt-6.1-sol and opus 5.5 are much, much less prone to this, if you include some coaching around complexity, YAGNI, that kind of thing
I've been building a side project end-to-end with agents, and it's really not true for complex software.
At a micro scale their code is right, but tons of invented complexity no sane person would introduce. I've found the two most common triggers are the models polluting their own context windows (poorly worded instructions in comments/issues/AGENTS.md) and a poor "taste" for breaking changes (they'll constantly try to make their additions non-breaking, and if prompted they can make breaking changes, it has to be very carefully scoped or they start assigning great reward to ripping out things)
Same experience. It's especially bad with Claude and anything with non-code text, where it will happily write up endless Claude-ese comments that break any rules in the repo and are constantly incorrect in small ways, catch them in the review, rewrite specific lines in ways that are still wrong despite still having the review in its context, and repeat twenty times in a row.
Yeah, you got to reinforce through prompting (which isn't dead!) at multi touch-points to make narrow bug fixes and not touch unrelated code.
And as others have said some models people prefer for implementation work are less prone to this.. 5.6 Sol, 6.1 Sol, Opus 5.5
Agents understand red/green/refactor. Tell them to follow it, and use a coverage tool.
That is how you end up with a test suite that now takes 10x as long, unless you occasionally prompt the agent to consolidate and group tests.
There are still a lot of issues with coding that require intervention. Just recently, I had Astra detect a minor bug in an HTTP client that resulted in it deciding that the best approach would be to spend 1800 LOC on implementing its own from scratch. Some other time, Opus 5.5 was trying to tell me that test runs on a small to mid-sized application would take another three weeks until they would be fully finished.
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Y'know, I had a teammate who had been claiming this up until it became clear that the horrific spike in production defects that we were struggling with was mostly attributable to them.
I'm not going to say that's always what happens. But I will say that you can't find problems you aren't watching for.
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And then you discover it’s added tests for insane things that shouldn’t be getting tests
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The coding loop and the review loop are orthogonal and probably should remain so. Not least because it's probably worth the money for more intelligent models for code reviews where it's a more focused task while coding loops are all over the place.
Weirdly enough I've found the opposite, using too smart a review model gets you overfit instead of benefit. The coding side can be more complex in a way that benefits from fable/astra, but the review side sometimes not so much.