- All models are terrible at generating line numbers for a proper diff, give up on them
- Some models (Owl-alpha) must have been post-trained on Codex transcripts, because they occasionally push its V4A patch format into any diff tool available
- Codex puts a lot of info in its system prompt about the desired patch style, making larger hunks instead of granular ones, etc
It's amazing anyone watched the last 2 decades of tech's enshitification and wants to hook their wagon to this shitshow.
dofm•14m ago
Only implicitly?
Many decades ago when I was working on research related to using MOOs as a learning environment, you would add "tool calls" into the stream of text that a MOO object might generate, so your rich client would e.g. show a picture, load a web page in a frame, move you on a map, trigger a change in an on-screen representation of an object.
Everyone who tried this ran into more or less the same problems that LLM clients do: any attempt to shoehorn control sequences into in-band content was riddled with security risks, objects accidentally triggering the wrong interface etc.; you could never truly communicate out-of-band.
The more I read about how agentic harnesses work, the less embarrassed I feel about the code twenty-something-year-old me wrote in a MOO client.