alt Hacker NewsI like to ask LLMs to find problems o improvements in 1-2 files. They are pretty good at finding bugs, but for general code improvements, 50-60% edits are trash. They add completely unnecessary stuff. If you ask them to improve a pretty well-written code, they rarely say it's good enough already.
For example, in a functional-style codebase, they will try to rewrite everything to a class. I have to adjust the prompt to list things that I'm not interested in. And some inexperienced people are trying to write better code by learning from such changes of LLMs...
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If you just ask it to find problems, it will do its best to find them - like running a while loop with no return condition. That's why I put some breaker in the prompt, which in this case would be "don't make any improvements if the positive impact is marginal". I've mostly seen it do nothing and just summarize why, followed by some suggestions in case I still want to force the issue
I asked Claude the other day to look at one of my hobby projects that has a client/server architecture and a bespoke network protocol, and brainstorm ideas for converting it over to HTTP, JSON-RPC, or something else standards-based. I specifically told it to "go wild" and really explore the space. It thought for a while and provided a decent number of suggestions (several I was unaware of) with "verdicts". Ultimately, though, it concluded that none of them were ideal, and that the custom wire protocol was fine and appropriate for the project. I was kind of shocked at this conclusion: I expected it to behave like that eager intern persona we all have come to expect--ready to rip up the code and "do things."