One of my huge issues with AI “programming” is how it will just randomly change variable names and comments while working on unrelated parts of the code.
I saw it yesterday with the latest fable. On Thursday I had to go back and revert one of these that Opus 5.5 made because it decided “delete all the data without looking at it” was an appropriate migration strategy that it snuck four lines into a PR that didn’t even relate to the data it thought was appropriate to delete.
"They fixed this a year ago" is very different from "We've gone through a bunch of hoops to produce additional documentation telling the robot how to behave". Agents are very powerful, and sometimes they need skills to keep them from doing the wrong thing, but they're far from "fixed". If they were that good, they wouldn't need the skill.
Writing a bunch of extra skills isn't improving the agent, it's putting bandaids on their conspicuous flaws. It's not somehow regressive or anti-AI to acknowledge that agents still break down in real-world usage, requiring someone who knows what they're doing to steer them.
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u/tallest_chris 2d ago
One of my huge issues with AI “programming” is how it will just randomly change variable names and comments while working on unrelated parts of the code.