Comment by softwaredoug
6 hours ago
IMO slop usually comes from overly defensive programming from LLMs. They’re loath to remove code and simplify, because unless we humans tell them some code / use case is unimportant, they have no reason to not care about it.
So agents can make these overly complex solutions trying to make bulletproof implementations and prevent regressions.
It requires a human to look at code, ask about complexity, and guide simplification by subtracting requirements implicit in the code.
They also seem to really bias towards tacking on new code to "work around" what's there, rather than breaking down what's there into smaller more composable bits that can serve the pre-existing use case and the new requirement elegantly.
LLMs write. It sounds glib but it's what they do, and so every problem they encounter they will try to write their way out of it without lots of hand holding.
they yearn to create content, generate more tokens, etc etc - agree
It's like we took the worst behavior of our colleagues, and went and said "yes, let's automate _that_ part" and patted ourselves on the back.
It’s more likely emergent behavior.
Yes exactly. And I’m not sure we want agents with that level of autonomy to decide what functionality is important and what to leave in place.
No, but it would sometimes be nice if they sometimes raised questions about what is important and what isn't