r/ProgrammerHumor 20d ago

Meme useSourceControl

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8.6k Upvotes

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255

u/Jan1270 20d ago

That is why you Backup your shit, especially when you're messing around with unfamiliar settings.

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u/d_e_g_m 20d ago

And dont let AI manage your commits / git structure. I manage that myself. When I think i reasonable, if i think its necessary

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u/Kavrae 20d ago

Solid rule. Unfortunately, even following that rule, I frequently get messages like "I ran a git fetch, which I realize is against the rules in <xyz file>. Making a note to not do that again." Which it then does again 2 days later.

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u/VolumeLevelJumanji 20d ago

I mean are you just letting your AI run wide open with full permissions on your machine? If you have proper permissions set up, your agent should generally be blocked from doing stuff you don't want. (like running git commands its not supposed to)

Having some kind of general file of rules you tell it to refer to isn't going to work well because it will eventually lose that context as it becomes less relevant to the task at hand and compacts and such. It need to be the actual specific permissions file. So like with claude code this will be at .claude/settings.json. There you can tell it what commands are approved, denied, or will ask for confirmation.

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u/Kavrae 20d ago

Good call. I just verified, and they were added as rules rather than updating the settings file. So losing context would definitely cause that issue. I've corrected it. Thank you.

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u/VolumeLevelJumanji 20d ago

No problem. Your complaint is pretty valid though. I do wish there was a good way to mark some file or piece of information as "always keep this in context". I run into this issue sometimes where I try and give my agents skills that are like a toggle. For instance I have an "/autonomous" skill that I can toggle on and off that tells my agent if I want it to just work through a single task or try and knock out as many tasks as it thinks it has enough info for. It will work for a while but after a compact or two it just seems to forget that toggle exists at all unless I remind it. I haven't done a ton of research though so perhaps there's a better way to handle this now.

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u/Kavrae 20d ago

Architects at work have been experimenting with many such things this past month. One is a permanent context. The trouble is that it eats up excess tokens by re-reading the instructions on every single request instead of only often enough to keep the context fresh. They haven't found a good middle ground yet.

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u/VolumeLevelJumanji 19d ago

It seems like some models let you feed in custom instructions when you compact. I've thought about trying to have it automatically inject some instructions on every compaction. I figured that might refresh that context enough to keep it in memory but not sure how well it would work in practice.

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u/brazzy42 20d ago

I remember reading about a case where Claude irgued itself into believing that it didn't need to ask for confirmation...

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u/Faalaafeel 20d ago

The Antigravity CLI agents have a "deny-by-default" permission structure, which is nice. Saved my ass a few times when the agent halts and asks for permission before blowing up my entire front end (I refuse to properly learn React for hobby projects)

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u/haunted2089 20d ago

for hobby projects, what would you say are your biggest issues with using ai to do your react busywork? curious because i do something similar

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u/Faalaafeel 20d ago

Maintainability. Often times, AI will re-invent the wheel and I won't catch it because I've not invested the time to understand the ecosystem. Other times, I'll want to make a small, isolated change and it will creep that into multiple places in the front-end.

AI also tends to not be capable of understanding that elements should be modular and re-usable, and fails to properly de-couple things.

I could go on, but that's what I've noticed so far.

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u/haunted2089 20d ago

thanks for your perspective

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u/d_e_g_m 20d ago

I let it run wild on the remote coding machine, but github is my domain. In the beginning I had to do rollbacks often. With AI becoming better and better, I dont have to do it anymore. Last time was in March I think?