logoalt Hacker News

johntb86yesterday at 7:06 PM1 replyview on HN

In theory you could generate a bunch of code that seems mostly correct and then gradually tweak it until it's closer and closer to compiling/working, but that seems ill-suited to how current AI agents work (or even how people work). AI agents are prone to make very local fixes without an understanding of wider context, where those local fixes break a lot of assumptions in other pieces of code.

It can be very hard to determine if an isolated patch that goes from one broken state to a different broken state is on net an improvement. Even if you were to count compile errors and attempt to minimize them, some compile errors can demonstrate fatal flaws in the design while others are minor syntax issues. It's much easier to say that broken tests are very bad and should be avoided completely, as then it's easier to ensure that no patch makes things worse than it was before.


Replies

eloisiusyesterday at 8:20 PM

> generate a bunch of code that seems mostly correct and then gradually tweak it until it's closer and closer to compiling/working

The diffusion model of software engineering