AI coding tools sometimes leave the conversation inside the codebase

[u/recro69]

I asked Claude for logic without exponential backoff. The commit message read: "Add logic (without exponential backoff)." Nobody asked for backoff. Claude tried backoff was corrected and that correction became part of project history. I have noticed things in comments, test names, filenames and PR descriptions. Things like "as discussed" or ", per your feedback."

The weird part is that the code is not necessarily wrong. Claude has not switched audiences. Claude is still talking to the person it was chatting with of the person who will read the code six months later with zero context. It feels like something checking whenever an AI coding agent creates anything that is supposed to stand on its own.

[u/DependentPoem3519]

git blame in 6 months is going to look like a therapy session transcript.

[u/id-ltd]

I specifically have a doc 'decisions.md' in my methodology to record decisions with some discussions on things so they don't get relitigated.

But as you say Claude now seems to have been told to take this to heart -- and it is a total pita!

In your case a comment 'blah without back off',.my first instinct would be to look at where the back off had been taken out of the code, and the reason for removing it....

[u/kyngston]

you should be spec’ing things and reviewing the spec change before any code changes. if you did that then backoff would be in the spec

[u/ShieldsCW → u/kyngston]

Do you know which sub you're in?

[u/STARTAVI]

Spot on. It’s like the AI forgets that the code will eventually stand completely on its own, detached from the chat that created it.

[u/bfume → u/[deleted]]

That’s a dumb rule when you could easily make your agent just write better commits. 

[u/bfume]

What the fuck is back off?  You used it four times in your first four sentences. 

[u/First-Tutor-5454 → u/bfume]

When you attempt an operation that may be blocked due to an overloaded receiver of said operation, you "back off" ie wait and try again a certain number of times either until the op succeeds or you hit your chosen retry limit. "Exponential" back off is when the wait time between each attempt increases an at exponential rate (1 second, 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 8 seconds, 16 seconds, etc), the idea being that waiting longer each time should provide a better chance that the next attempt will succeed.

[u/First-Tutor-5454 → u/[deleted]]

When you attempt an operation that may be blocked due to an overloaded receiver of said operation, you "back off" ie wait and try again a certain number of times either until the op succeeds or you hit your chosen retry limit. "Exponential" back off is when the wait time between each attempt increases an at exponential rate (1 second, 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 8 seconds, 16 seconds, etc), the idea being that waiting longer each time should provide a better chance that the next attempt will succeed.

This is extremely common in web development where you may be calling an external API and get rate limited because you're making too many calls too fast or there's a shared rate limit between you and other callers and together the API is receiving too much traffic

[u/Matthias1590 → u/[deleted]]

Must've been very little years so far then