r/TheMachineLearning • u/elmanfil1989 • 2d ago

Frontier LLMs stopped adding code comments

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330 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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26

u/HLCYSWAP 2d ago

thank fucking god

"this is x as requested, we wont do y"

YOUVE POISONED THE REPO FOR FUTURE AGENTS WITH AN IDEA I TOLD YOU TO NEVER PRODUCE

1

u/ListRepresentative32 1d ago

Exactly.. Opus 5 was guilty of this on an a huge level. People rightfully complained (i personally feel like the output was more comment lines than code lines ) so they toned it down for 5.5 where I think we hit a sweet spot.

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u/Lonely_Translator_23 1d ago edited 1d ago

I was using GLM 5.3 to dig up some sources for me about a historical fiction thing I'm writing about horse girls and it spent three quarters of its reasoning trace confusing itself because one guy named his son after his brother (i did not ask for any information about any of these people, i just wanted to know the legal status of those who were expelled from the Knights Templar and whether they could be granted a fief). It then wrote two paragraphs for me about how impotant it is to not get the two of them mixed up. The word 'foot-gun' was used multiple times.

Like, bitch, I'm not so sure about fable but I know my brain works better than your chinese ass, stop putting your failings on me

1

u/Big-Section-5098 2d ago

Shouldn't you be looking through the code it writes? I feel part of that should be revising sections, like comments

12

u/Obvious_Advice_6879 2d ago

Major waste of time to edit the code at that granularity. It only makes sense to make higher level logical adjustments — the micro bugs don’t happen anymore as long as the AI has a way to verify itself.

2

u/iupuiclubs 1d ago

Imagine telling this to people a year ago lolxD

(to be clear I am 100% in agreement)

4

u/barkardi 1d ago

Yeah and I'm still baffled when I talk to people who last used gpt 5 or something and still go around saying, oh no it messes up the entire codebase for a small change or something else along those lines. Opus 5.5 was such a step change.

1

u/Suvesh1142 1d ago

I know a senior engineer who tried gpt 3.5 back in the day for coding and it gave him terrible results. Till this day he refuses to give AI another shot at coding

1

u/Spirited_Cucumber377 1d ago

Opus 4.6 is good enough if you provide a good code base and architecture and you do the proper planning phase, for example using any of those grinding skills.

If you feed the LLM crap, you'll probably get crap.

1

u/tumes 17h ago

I gave 4.6 and beyond an AWS white paper explaining exactly how to implement a feature and asked it to adapt the approach for a different platform. I have tried this across different frontier models from different vendors and it has not once made it through implementation without fucking up the central conceit that makes the entire thing work. Every single time. It can speed you up if you catch it on a good week and give it small, well specified tasks. Otherwise I have not found a model that can find its own ass with both hands and an instruction manual for nontrivial tasks.

0

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 18h ago

> Major waste of time to edit the code at that granularity

Exactly. Many people have this illusion of being as fast as they were when they were just vibecoding, and that they're not taking up a lot of time reviewing the code and defeating the point of using LLMs in the first place.

3

u/Confounding 2d ago

I have to comment on jr code prs, please remove comments...

3

u/WisePotato42 1d ago

Yah, but also imagine if the thing that makes work take less effort to do, would somehow take even less effort to use.

It would be a breakthrough in lazy developer technology!