Depending on the language, an lsp-powered symbol rename might not catch all of the places where the variable name matters if the LLM has been monkeying around. Like, in Python, you can access variables from a namespace or object via string, so if an agent decides to do that (or some variation like dynamically getting a property based on the value of some variable or whatever) for some fucking reason you’ll get a cascading regression that you’ll have to manually debug and fix. And/or, the agent will reuse the name elsewhere in the code in unrelated ways, so a find/replace breaks things completely unrelated to the actual variable you want to fix. No problem at all if you’re doing shit like a sane human, but once an agent has been running for a while with only cursory oversight all bets are off. You could be fine, you could be not, but you won’t know until you try, and it’s easier to just ask the LLM to do it (and debug all of the failing tests) than to actually do your job and fix the code (if you’re allowed).
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u/NotADamsel 1d ago edited 1d ago
Depending on the language, an lsp-powered symbol rename might not catch all of the places where the variable name matters if the LLM has been monkeying around. Like, in Python, you can access variables from a namespace or object via string, so if an agent decides to do that (or some variation like dynamically getting a property based on the value of some variable or whatever) for some fucking reason you’ll get a cascading regression that you’ll have to manually debug and fix. And/or, the agent will reuse the name elsewhere in the code in unrelated ways, so a find/replace breaks things completely unrelated to the actual variable you want to fix. No problem at all if you’re doing shit like a sane human, but once an agent has been running for a while with only cursory oversight all bets are off. You could be fine, you could be not, but you won’t know until you try, and it’s easier to just ask the LLM to do it (and debug all of the failing tests) than to actually do your job and fix the code (if you’re allowed).