[yoyohello13]

I’ve been working with these things for quite some time now and every time I simply “treat it like I would a human” it seems to perform better. I can’t imagine agents wouldn’t perform better in a clean codebase than a giant mess of one. Just like it performs better when it has well formed specs and access to documentation.

[jaggederest]

It actually goes even further than humans, humans can pretty rapidly get inured to things being awkward or messy and stop noticing, but the context for agents is taking up the same space and "attention" every time they're run, and they're creations entirely of context, so the quality and examples matter massively.

[maccard]

> actually goes even further than humans, humans can pretty rapidly get inured to things being awkward or messy and stop noticing,

You’ve never had an agent completely lose the plot and forget/confuse its instructions due to the context filling up?

[Muromec]

That's the moment it should take a nap to compress the context. If you are expose the context size to the agent through some diagnostic input it will even do it itself

[embedding-shape]

> I can’t imagine agents wouldn’t perform better in a clean codebase than a giant mess of one.

I guess it depends on what you mean with "better" but almost all the agent-built projects I do with zero regards to code quality, design and architecture ends up with every single agent needing 10+ minutes to do even the easy changes, while the ones where I focused on those things together with the agent, large changes can take 10+ minutes but everything else is solved faster.

I don't have empirical evidence of this yet, I guess I should put together some sort of test to confirm/disconfirm this.