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zzleeperyesterday at 7:43 PM2 repliesview on HN

I just went to bed and left it running; was expecting maybe 20 minutes :)

And I did gave the program a bunch of code guides -- this [1] for instance -- which included quotes like "Prefer straightforward code over clever code." but somehow that didn't matter.

[1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/overengineered-rand-mcnally...


Replies

chriskananyesterday at 10:46 PM

I'm an AI professor, and the same thing happened to me. I had written out contracts and specs for some novel algorithms to compare. And instead it created a new sandboxed environment with 20k lines of code to ensure we do gold standard science.... didn't implement the algorithms at all. In another case, I left it overnight with a plan, and it decided to write a 50k line new overly engineered plan. Suffice to say, I don't use any frontier models for doing coding work anymore. I use them to make detailed plans and use good worker AIs for execution, which don't overthink everything.

jiggawattsyesterday at 8:24 PM

You write many pages telling the AI to split and structure the scripts into a bunch of folders, so why are you surprised it did exactly that!?

I just ask it verbatim “recommend some cleanup” with /plan, review, and then apply.