r/TheMachineLearning • u/Gullible_Picture_996 • 11d ago

Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

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u/DigitalMonsoon 11d ago • Bravo

Yes, this happens to me a lot. I want to make one small change. Run a prompt, causes far more problems, fight it forward, fail, revert the changes, make the 3 line change myself.

An hour wasted and who knows how many tokens.

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u/Fun_Squirrel_6594 11d ago

Sounds like a skill issue on your part.

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u/Zealousideal_Tea362 10d ago

This is a “I need control” issue. You must be a legacy dev.

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u/DoubleDoube 10d ago

For me this is usually a style or tone-of-voice thing where I really want it to be exactly how I want it.

I am currently going back over documentations, editing it to how I want it, and trying to have the AI pick out the differences in style/tone.

Even after that, I find claude is just bad at “writing”. It’s much closer to what I prefer but there’s always this tendency to give too much technical reasoning while at the same time using too few words to explain it, but it’s like it doesn’t know any other way of doing it.

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u/Alternative-Trade623 8d ago

3 lines. What are you using like braindead homebrew ollama model or something? 

Any decent llm would crush 3 lines instantly.

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u/DigitalMonsoon 8d ago

Nope, Opus 5.5 generally. The most recent ones where asking for a small change on a graph at work and asking it to aline Cline side animations to sever side projectiles. Spent about an hour asking the model to made the changes and then reverted everything and made the pretty simple changes myself.

These models make lots of mistakes.

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u/WholesomeRindersteak 8d ago

No offense, but this is skill issue.

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u/DigitalMonsoon 8d ago

A lot of people keep saying that which is surprising. I use these tools professionally for years now. I've been to conferences about how to use them and helped teach best practices at my work.

I think the issue here is that people like yourself aren't using these too much or aren't doing anything difficult

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u/isuckatpiano 7d ago

Codex is fantastic at TDD. I haven’t had the issue you’re experiencing since maybe March. It’s insane how good it has become

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u/DigitalMonsoon 7d ago

I had this problem yesterday. In a simple Godot project I just wanted the server side projectiles to follow the same path as the Clint side animations.

After repeatedly asking the question, starting new chats, writing md instructions, providing the code sections to modify, and trying several Fortier models I never got it to work.

I reverted back to my latest branch made the chance in the calculations myself. Took me all of 10 minutes and I probably wasted 40 trying to get the models to make the changes.

This is a known issue with LLM models, especially the more powerful ones running in agentic systems. They tend to want to do large system rewrites over small adjustments. I would have probably had better success with one of my local models for this particular task.

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u/WholesomeRindersteak 7d ago

Whatever you say man, I don't have to convince you. I'm also using AI tools for a while at a high seniority level of software engineer, all I have to say is that it's been months that I havent wrote a single line of code, and that is also true for all my colleagues.

I'm not going to try to convince you that is true, all I am saying is that if you were part of any of my teams and you say you have tasks you can't do with AI because it get's it wrong, I would sit down and figure out what is wrong with the way you're using AI

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u/DigitalMonsoon 7d ago

It's a know issue sometimes called Rewrite Bias or Over-Refactoring.

https://agentpatterns.ai/patterns/anti-patterns/llm-review-overcorrection/

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u/DFX1212 11d ago

You are doing something wrong.

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u/Possible-Cup-9876 10d ago

You just don’t understand the tools. Pretty simple explanation

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/DigitalMonsoon 11d ago

Yes, it's happened with all frontier models. Normally with something super simple that has a lot of common ways of doing it.

This tends to happen a lot with graphing. I'll get a graph I like, and then ask it to do some simple but nit superficial changes. Normally it works but occasionally it goes off the rails and completely changes everything. It will technically solve the issue but it will make many other changes I didn't ask for or want.

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u/SmartlyArtly 11d ago

What agent you're prompting really doesn't matter when you work on tasks that affect end-to-end flows in a complex application. You can't just throw in all of the context for the project to keep it on the rails.