The LLM can easily do this type of stuff, just tell it and it'll happily do it. This is exactly what I mean when I tell people they need to work closer with the AI, tell it how to do things. Don't just tell it what to do and get frustrated when it does it differently than you would.
A good way to achieve this without writing huge prompts is tell it to plan the change first. Just give it some vague low-effort directions. It'll usually get most things right, you tell it what you want different and once you're happy you tell it to go ahead.
Claude 100% of the time even thinks we use laravel despite the project being some old lumen codebase, so most of laravels features are not available. It also gets the PHP version we are using wrong 100% of the time.
I also think your excuse is bad. "The code is legacy fucked so I'll just legacy fuck it some more because I can't be bothered to make an effort"
Maybe that's something we can hope for in a next-generation of LLM product. Right now, the race seems to be all about performance and capability, but maybe when we get to a plateau of performance, vendors can start differentiating by building tools with clearer voices and expectations-- focused system prompts and training, maybe. If you know DeepSeek will follow your requests fairly literally, while Qwen will start adding best-effort tweaks, you can decide which one is the right choice for a given task.
I asked Claude to read two logs and assemble them in a single table for easy reading the other day. It takes me like 30 seconds to pull and toggle between the logs normally, but I figured it would be nice to have a skill to let the machine crunch it all onto a single page. After 5 minutes, it spat up a ball of Markdown with half the content truncated and summarized it in a way I didn't ask for and had no interest in.
If I had asked a human to do it, there's no way it would come to that conclusion because doing the wrong thing is literally more effort. Maybe the model did those things because "typical" requests want summarization so it's the implicit default, but IT SHOULDN'T BE MY RESPONSIBILITY TO GUESS THIS.
I don't really get how you guys can be so demanding - this technology is magic. It's doing things that 5 years ago we could only dream of. It still blows my mind every time I paste a screenshot of some vague issue along with a quick and dirty prompt and it just gets it and gives me the right answer immediately.
In the hands of a competent user these things are absolutely incredible, I can develop solutions faster, with higher quality and less effort. So honestly man all you guys complaining that they aren't good enough? I can't help but think you guys must really not be very competent. Complaining about problems while the solution is staring you in the face.
I have experienced enterprise codebases that have been DRY'd to the point they become ossified.
It's also possible in many of these cases to identify sub-patterns you could abstract, to create a set of tools you can compose in different ways in order to satisfy the different use cases. Instead of one function/component you make multiple, and use them together.
All this stuff is just basic programming but I've mostly given up trying to preach about it. Most people don't care, and even if they did care they just don't have the talent to write really good code. It's rare to find a dev who does really solid work. In my experience you either do it because that's who you are, or nothing I say will make any difference.
I wonder how often the Agent actually follows the guidance. I do see them follow it when I look. But it doesn't seem so every time.
