alt Hacker News> For example, have you ever seen an agent follow the boy scout rule? Where they leave code better than they found it? And would you WANT them to try to do this?
Yes, it's in the rules; run profiles, check code coverage, do a critical review, post the report and follow up tasks. 90% of people I've worked with did not follow these boy scout rules nearly as well as today's frontier LLMs.
Is the author implying this is bad?
That quote is the lead in to an example I talk about after this quote illustrates what I often see.
> Agents bias to making the current change as safely as possible. I had a situation in a previous codebase where one morning, pre-caffeinated, my meat brain mentioned using browser local storage. So some random state was managed in local storage. Everything else through a backend database. When I looked at the code, the amount of wrapping and indirection to preserve this idiotic human mistake probably tripled the LoC. Agents can amplify our one-off bad decisions by being so conservative.
You can of course solve this many ways. And many of boils down to just how a particular humans brain works. Some will solve this by not reading code. Some will read / write code.
Whatever works for you is great. But many there is upside to the precision of not having code intermediated through the LLM for many.