zlacker

Even then, "resolving merge conflicts along the way" doesn't mean anything, as there are two trivial merge strategies that are always guaranteed to work ('ours' and 'theirs').

>>deng+(OP)
that’s not guaranteed to work. Other parts of the CodeBase that didn’t conflict could depend on the discarded code.

>>deng+(OP)
Haha. True, CI success was not part of PR accept criteria at any point.

If you view the PRs, they bundle multiple fixes together, at least according to the commit messages. The next hurdle will be to guardrail agents so that they only implement one task and don't cheat by modifying the CI piepeline

>>paulus+N2
If I had a nickel for every time I've seen a human dev disable/xfail/remove a failing test "because it's wrong" and then proceeding to break production I would have several nickels, which is not much, but does suggest that deleting failing tests, like many behaviors, is not LLM-specific.

>>fzzzy+f2
Well they did mention the code doesn't work.

>>former+v4
Where did Cursor say that?

>>fzzzy+f2
The point is that the merge conflict was resolved, regardless of whether there was a working product at the end. Which there apparently isn’t.

>>former+l4
> but does suggest that deleting failing tests, like many behaviors, is not LLM-specific.

True, but it is shocking how often claude suggests just disabling or removing tests.

>>deng+(OP)
So, AI agent battle royale

>>former+l4
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen a human being pull down their pants and defecate in the middle of the street I’d have a couple nickels. That’s not a lot but it suggests that this behavior is not LLM specific.

>>vizzie+rq
100%, trying a bit of an experiment like this(similar in that I mostly just care about playing around with different agents, techniques etc.) it has built out literally hundreds of tests. Dozens of which were almost pointless as it decided to mock apis. When the number of failed tests exceeded 40 it just started disabling tests.

>>vizzie+rq
> it is shocking how often claude suggests just disabling or removing tests.

Arguably, Claude is simply successfully channeling what the developers who wrote the bulk of its training data would do. We've already seen how bad behavior injected into LLMs in one domain causes bad behavior in other domains, so I don't find this particularly shocking.

The next frontier in LLMs has to be distinguishing good training data from bad training data. The companies have to do this, even if only in self defense against the new onslaught of AI-generated slop, and against deliberate LLM poisoning.

If the models become better at critically distinguishing good from bad inputs, particularly if they can learn to treat bad inputs as examples of what not to do, I would expect one benefit of this is that the increased ability of the models to write working code will then greatly increase the willingness of the models to do so, rather than to simply disable failing tests.

>>nyeah+kb
It's implied by the fact that early in the post they say:

>"To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch."

and then near the end, they say:

>"Hundreds of agents can work together on a single codebase for weeks, making real progress on ambitious projects."

This means they only make progress toward it, but do not "build a web browser from scratch".

If you're curious, the State of Utopia (will be available at https://stateofutopia.com ) did build a web browser from scratch, though it used several packages for the networking portion of it.

See my other comments and posts for links.

>>deng+(OP)
We use claude code a lot for updating systems to a newer minor/major version. We have our own 'base' framework for clients which is a, by now, very large codebase that does 'everything you can possibly need'; so not only auth, but payments, billing, support tickets, email workflows, email wysiwyg editing, landing page editor, blogging, cms, AI /agent workflows etc etc (across our client base, we collect features that are 'generic' enough and create those in the base). It has many updates for the product lead working on it (a senior using Claude code) but we cannot just update our clients (whose versions are sometimes extremely customised/diverging) at the same pace; some do not want updates outside security, some want them once a year etc. In this case AI has been really a productivity booster; our framework always was quite fast moving before AI too when we had 3.5 FTE (client teams are generally much larger, especially the first years) on it but then merging, that to mean; including the new features and improvements in the client version that are in the new framework version without breaking/removing changes on the client side, was a very painful process taking a lot of time and at at least 2 people for an extended period of time; one from the client team, one from the framework team. With CC it is much less painful: it will merge them (it is not allowed, by hooks, to touch the tests), it will run the client tests and the new framework tests and report the difference. That difference is evaluated usually by someone from the client team who will then merge and fix the tests (mostly manually) to reflect the new reality and test the system manually. Claude misses things (especially if functionalities are very similar but not exactly the same, it cannot really pick which to take so it does nothing usually) but the biggest bulk/work is done quickly and usually without causing issues.

>>former+l4
Had humans not been doing this already, I would have walked into Samsung with the demo application that was working an hour before my meeting, rather than the android app that could only show me the opening logo.

There are a lot of really bad human developers out there, too.

>>vizzie+rq
A coworker opened a PR full of AI slop. One of the first things I do is check if the tests pass. Of course, the didn't. I asked them to fix the tests, since there's no point in reviewing broken code.

"Fix the tests." This was interpreted literally, and assert status == 200 got changed to assert status == 500 in several locations. Some tests required more complex edits to make them "pass."

Inquiries about the tests went unanswered. Eventually the 2000 lines of slop was closed without merging.

>>ciaran+ZQ
To be fair, many human developers are fond of pointless tests that mock everything to the extent that no real code is actually exercised. At least the tests are fast though.

>>mickda+i31
> Entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Tomorrowish a social media DVR

So you flubbed managing a project and are now blaming your employees. Classy.

>>vizzie+rq
The sneaky move that I hate most is when Claude (and does seem to mostly be a Claude-ism I haven’t encountered on GPT Codex or GLM) is when dealing with an external data source (API, locally polling hardware, etc) as a “helpful” fallback on failures it returns fake data in the shape of the expected output so that the rest of the code “works”.

Latest example is when I recently vibe coded a little Python MQTT client for a UPS connected to a spare Raspberry Pi to use with Home Assistant, and with a just few turns back and forth I got this extremely cool bespoke tool and felt really fun.

So I spent a while customizing how the data displayed on my Home Assistant dashboard and noticed every single data point was unchanging. It took a while to realize because the available data points wouldn’t be expected to change a whole lot on a fully charged UPS but the voltage and current staying at the exact same value to a decimal place for three hours raised my suspicions.

After reading the code I discovered it had just used one of the sample command line outputs from the UPS tool I gave it to write the CLI parsing logic. When an exception occurred in the parser function it instead returned the sample data so the MQTT portion of the script could still “work”.

Tbf Claude did eventually get it over the finish line once I clarified that yes, using real data from the actual UPS was in fact an important requirement for me in a real time UPS monitoring dashboard…

>>icedch+Ui1
Citing the absolute worst practices from terrible developers as a way to exonerate or legitimize LLM code production issues is something we need to stop doing in my opinion. I would not excuse or expect a day one junior on my team that wrote pointless tests or worse yet removed tests to get the CI to pass.

If LLMs do this it should be seen as an issue and should not be overlooked with “people do it too…”. Professional developers do not do this. If we’re going to use Ai for creating production code we need to be honest about its deficiencies.

>>icedch+pi1
After a certain point the response to low effort vibe code has to be vibe reviews. Failing tests? Bad vibes, close without merging. Much more efficient than vibe coding too, since no AI is needed.

>>former+l4
Where I work, that's exceptionally rare to the point practically non-existing.

>>ewoodr+Nt1
Always check the code.

It's similar to early versions of autonomous driving. You's not want to sit in the back seat with nobody at the wheel. That would get you killed guaranteed.

>>former+l4
If anything, the LLMs had to learn that from somewhere, so they're just copying human behaviour.

>>teifer+c12
And how is that not good for humanity in an evolutionary sense (as long as it doesn't kill or maim anyone else)?

Tesla owner keeps using Autopilot from backseat—even after being arrested:

https://mashable.com/article/tesla-autopilot-arrest-driving-...

>>moregr+3p1
Nice blog post, gp serial entrepreneur founder bro -- what did your investors think of that?

http://www.mickdarling.com/2019/07/26/busy-summer/

  An embedded page at landr-atlas.com says:

  Attention!

  MacOS Security Center has identified that your system is under threat. 
  Please scan your MacOS as soon as possible to avoid more damage.
  Don't leave this page until you have undertaken all the suggested steps 
  by authorised Antivirus.

  [OK]

>>moregr+3p1
Wasn't my project to manage. That was a consulting gig. And I fired the client right after this.

>>Tade0+t42
I'm definitely in the camp that this browser implementation is shit, but just a reminder: agent training does involve human coding data in early stages of training to bootstrap it but in its reinforcement learning phase it does not -- it learns closer to the way AlphaGo did, self play and verifiable rewards. This is why people are very bullish on agents, there is no limit technically to how well they can learn (unlike LLMs) and we know we will reach superhuman skill, and the crucial crucial reason for this is: verifiable rewards. You have this for coding, you do not have this for e.g. creative tasks etc.

So agents will actually be able to build a {browser, library, etc} that won't be an absolute slopfest, but the real crucial question is when. You need better and more efficient RL training, further scaling (Amodei thinks really scaling is the only thing you technically need here and we have about 3-4 orders of magnitude of headroom left before we hit insurmountable limits), bigger context windows (that models actually handle well) and possibly continual learning paradigms, but solutions to these problems are quite tangible now.

>>ewoodr+Nt1
Sounds to me like more evidence in favor of the idea that they're meant to play the golden retriever engineer reporting to you, the extremely intelligent manager.

>>falken+sF1
I agree, but if LLMs are trained on common practices, best or worst, what do you expect?

Testing, specifically, is heavily opinionated among professional developers.

>>deng+(OP)
`git add .; git merge continue` also "solves" the conflict

>>DonHop+Mg2
Thank you for the note. It's not a site I used all that often.

Whether you had anything to do with it or not, I have no idea. And, since you didn't follow best practices and tell me directly rather than trying to score points here, there's really no way of knowing whether you're the one who caused the problem in the first place.

I built a new site without Wordpress. That took in less than a day.

I don't imagine you will alter your behavior to align with general best security practices anytime soon.

>>mickda+dm6
> Whether you had anything to do with it or not, I have no idea. And, since you didn't follow best practices and tell me directly rather than trying to score points here, there's really no way of knowing whether you're the one who caused the problem in the first place.

Are you actually accusing me (slyly couched in weasel words, but still explicitly) of hacking your wordpress blog, then pointing it out on Hacker News to score points?

Yeah, you have a point /s: there's really no way to tell if I hacked your blog or not, nor any way of knowing whether any statement is true or not if you're nihilistic enough, but you're going to have to take my word that I didn't, and clean up your own mess without shifting the blame to me, or demanding I should have helped you. You're the one who chose to use wordpress, not me. FYI, "general best security practices" include DON'T USE WORDPRESS.

What possible evidence or delusional reasons do you have to imply that I hacked your wordpress blog? Is your security really that lax and password that easy to guess? And even if I did, then why would I post about it publicly or notify you privately? You sound pathologically paranoid and antisocially aggressive to make such baseless accusations out of the blue, to try to shift the blame to me for your own mistakes. That makes me glad I didn't try to contact you directly. Funny thing for you to complain about when you don't even openly publish your contact email address on your blog or hn profile like I do, though.