alt Hacker News> Whew. Ok. You don't tell it the code is slow. Do you tell your coworker "Hey, your code is slow" and expect great results?
Yes? Why don't you?
They are capable people that just didn't notice something, id I notice some telemetry and tell them "hey this is slow" they are expected to understand the reason(s).
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Yeah if my co-worker can't start figuring out why the code is slow, with a reasonable reference to what the code in question is, that is a knock against their skills. I would actually expect some ideas as to what the problem is just off the top of their heads, but that the coding agent can't do that isn't a hit against it specifically, this is now a good part of what needs to be done differently.
The suggestion to tell the agent to do performance analysis of the part of the code you think is problematic, and offer suggestions for improvements seems like the proper way to talk to a machine, whereas "hey your code is slow" feels like the proper way to talk to a human.
Well, I would say something like "We seem to be having some performance issues the business has noticed in the XYZ stuff. Shall we sit down together and see if we can work out if we can improve things?"
So, you observed some telemetry - which would have been some sort of specific metric, right? Wouldn't you communicate that to them as well, not just "it's slow"?
"Hey, I saw that metric A was reporting 40% slower, are you aware already or have any ideas as to what might be causing that?"
Those two approaches are going to produce rather distinctly different results whether you're speaking to a human or typing to a GPU.