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0 pointsac295mo ago0 comments

> What do you mean by "have it learn your conventions"?

I'll give you an example: I use ruff to format my python code, which has an opinionated way of formatting certain things. After an initial formatting, Opus 4.5, without prompting, will write code in this same style so that the ruff formatter almost never has anything to do on new commits. Sonnet 4.5 is actually pretty good at this too.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

UncleMeat5mo ago· 5 in thread

Isn't this a meaningless example? Formatters already exist. Generating code that doesn't need to be formatted is exactly the same as generating code and then formatting it.

I care about the norms in my codebase that can't be automatically enforced by machine. How is state managed? How are end-to-end tests written to minimize change detectors? When is it appropriate to log something?

eterm5mo ago

Here's an example:

We have some tests in "GIVEN WHEN THEN" style, and others in other styles. Opus will try to match each style of testing by the project it is in by reading adjacent tests.

vidarh5mo ago

The one caveat with this, is that in messy code bases it will perpetuate bad things, unless you're specific about what you want. Then again, human developers will often do the same and are much harder to force to follow new conventions.

gck15mo ago

The second part is what I'd also like to have.

But I think it should be doable. You can tell it how YOU want the state to be managed and then have it write a custom "linter" that makes the check deterministic. I haven't tried this myself, but claude did create some custom clippy scripts in rust when I wanted to enforce something that isn't automatically enforced by anything out there.

UncleMeat5mo ago

Lints are typically well suited for syntactic properties or some local semantic properties. Almost all interesting challenges in software design and evolution involve nonlocal semantic properties.

scotty795mo ago

Memes write themselves.

"AI has X"

"We have X at home"

"X at home: x"

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