[sroussey]

Once it writes the code, take that into a new session to fix a bug. Repeat with new sessions. Don’t let it read the buggy code, it will just get worse.

[neom]

Yah this works for me and I'm not a SWE. I use it to make marketing websites. Sometimes it will do something perfectly but mess up one part, if I keep getting it to fix that one part in the same session almost certainly it's never going to work (I burnt a week this way). However, if I take it into a brand-new GPT sessions and say here is this webpage i wrote, but I made a mistake and the dropdown box should be on the left not the right, it can almost always fix it. Again, I'm not really a SWE so I'm not sure what is going on here, but if you click the drop down on that "Analyzing" thing that shows up, in the same session it seems to try to re-work the code from memory, on a new session if you look at the drop down Analyzing thing, it seems to be using a different method to re-work the code.

[obmelvin]

Interesting - I almost always iterate on code in the same session. I will try doing it with history off and frequently re-starting the session. I naively assumed the extra context would help, but I can see how it's also just noise when there are 5 versions of the same code in the context.

[mvdtnz]

How do you not let it read the buggy code but also take it into a new session?

[goriv]

I assume just copy and paste it

[no_carrier]

I'm just as confused... If you're copy/pasting the code into a new session, isn't that reading the code?

[SushiHippie]

The way I understand it:

First Variant:

1. User: Asks coding question

2. Ai: Outputs half functioning code

3. User: Asks to fix specific things

4. Ai: Creates buggy code

5. User: asks again to fix things

6. Ai: writes even more buggy code

Proposed second variant with copying code:

Until step 4 everything stays the same, but instead of asking it to fix the code again you copy it into another session, this way, you'll repeat step 3 again, without the LLM "seeing" the code it previously generated for step 4.

[neom]

I dunno how you SWE's are doing it, but I have my ChatGPT output files and if multi, zip files, not code snippets (unless I want a code snippet), and then I re-upload those files to new session using the attach thinger. Also, in my experience just building marketing websites, I don't do step 3, I just do step 1 and 2 over and over in new sessions, it's longer because you have to figure out a flow through a bunch of work sessions, but it's faster because it makes wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy fewer mistakes. (You're basically just shaking off any additional context the GPT has at all about what you are doing when you put it in a brand-new session, so it can be more focused on the task, I guess?)